Social Mention vs. Topsy

Social Mention is a great tool for monitoring social media. This Tool can also be used to search specifically taking the keywords in the blogs, comments, news etc. It offers a third party API for users. It can be used to send email to clients of their brand performance data. This tool can indicate if your mentions are angry, happy or neutral but the data can't be reliable.

Incentivized

Based off the price, I'd be hesitant to blindly recommend Topsy unless there is a need for the kind of big data it provides access to. If access to every single Tweet ever sent about your brand is important, then there is nothing else out there will do what Topsy does. At $12,000 per user, this is definitely not a product for the small social team, but if you manage a larger brand where reporting and brand sentiment mean a lot, then you owe it to yourself to evaluate Topsy Pro

• Can predict future response from today's number.
• Let's you judge which types of campaigns to run.
• Has a very well managed dashboard of results.

Incentivized

• Access to every single tweet ever sent since the start of Twitter.
• Immediate access to results - extremely easy to generate search queries.
• Multiple ways to visualize data.

• Under the "Free" dashboard you are limited to only receiving weekly results.
• Can't negate those tags which contain my tags.
• Lots of tweets missing, no noise filtering. Sometimes we get very old contents which are not needed.

Incentivized

• Pricing is steep and on a per-user basis.
• Limited amount of data sources - Twitter, links and videos.

I love that Social Mention is so easy to use. It does not take a long time to learn how to navigate the site when you need information quickly. I don't use it as much in my new job, but I recommend it for basic monitoring and when you need social media information right away

Quite simply, there is no other option out there with the amount of data we can get from Topsy. Others (like Radian6) have a large amount of data, but it isn't as easy to find, and creating reports is too cumbersome. Report generation in Topsy takes seconds, not minutes

The few times we have asked questions, they were answered instantly by our own account rep

It doesn't work as well since we changed our name. We used to have a very unique twitter handle etc. so it was easier for social mention to find us. For folks who have unique names it's excellent if you don't it may not be that helpful.

Social Mention streamed everything together, calculated my sentiment for me, allows me to filter what results I am personally looking for, extract my RSS feed and navigate to one of the channels of buzz.

• The paid-version actually had a negative ROI for us as it would sometimes feed us topically inappropriate articles and didn't allow us to filter by source so as to eliminate inappropriate blogs and inappropriate news sources (like highly politically partisan ones).

• Immediate access to campaign performance data in social. Our sales team regularly requests metrics from campaigns several years old, and with Topsy, we can dig in and find it. This assists in helping them in their sales pitches to new clients and renewing deals with previous clients.