These social analytics platforms represent diverse solutions to the social media analytics need. AlchemyAPI and Semantria will typically be of interest to larger organisations who need tailored analysis capability, while SproutSocial, UberVU and ViralHeat provide nicely packaged analytics environments for individuals and smaller organisations, although all cater for large organisations too. Cyfe is unusual in that it bridges business and social media monitoring needs.
AlchemyAPI – is a SaaS service supporting keyword analysis and sentiment analysis within a broader text analysis capability. This is the cloud based version of the natural language processing technologies they provide, and an appliance is also available for on-site installation. A free Starter plan is available throttled to 1000 transactions a day, and a number of subscriptions are available from small business (US$250/mo for 5000 transactions per day) to very large data volumes which are negotiable.
Cyfe – When most people think of dashboards they tend to think of data from internal sources such as production and finance, or social media data. Cyfe has very cleverly created a dashboard environment that caters to both needs, allowing social data to be placed side-by-side with other business data in a single attractive dashboard environment.
The whole environment is widget driven, and so it is very easy to connect with social sources such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (many others too) and display data in a wide variety of formats using pre-built widgets The same applies to business data, and widgets provide many graph and chart types including line, spline, area, area-spline, stacked area, column, … , pie, donut, list, funnel, tables – and so on.
Because of its broad functionality Cyfe will be a suitable alternative for products such as Tableau Public in some instances, and certainly a top contender for people considering a social media monitoring dashboard.
A free account is offered for people with modest needs, or the Premium service offers pretty well unlimited everything for $19 per month.
Semantria – provides text analytics and sentiment analysis for a broad range of inputs. An Excel add-in is available supporting content categorization, entity extraction and sentiment scoring. The Semantria API is based on Lexalytics Salience, one of the best known text analytics and sentiment analysis engines. SDKs are provided for most programming languages. The standard subscription is US$999/mo for 100,000 transactions/mo, and enterprise subscriptions are negotiable (2,000,000+ transactions per month)
SproutSocial – provides an attractive user interface for social media monitoring and analytics. Engagement is one of the stronger features allowing interaction with customers and influencers. The analytics supports drill down to message level and both profile level reports and reports across multiple profiles. Pricing is based on per user and starts at US$39/mo for standard, up to US$99/mo for Premium. A free trial is offered for all subscription levels (without credit card).
UberVU – provides a very effective real-time view of social activity via a number of informative graphs. These include spikes and bursts, trending stories, influencers and geographical analysis. A dashboard allows reply to posts, schedules and connection to influencers. A variety of reports can be built using drag and drop widgets, incorporating graphs and charts. Subscription starts at US$499/mo with unlimited users.
ViralHeat – is one of the best known social media marketing suites with competitive analysis, reputation management, alerts and APIs to embed social media analytics into applications. Sentiment analysis includes analysis of trends, an API and a Chrome extension. The functionality is too broad to provide details here, but with a free personal account and modest pricing for small businesses (US$99.99/mo) this is a very attractive solution for many users.