Choosing a social listening tool: the questions that matter
Listening tools range from free alerts to five-figure enterprise platforms, and the marketing all sounds identical. The differences that matter sit in five questions.
Coverage: where does it actually listen?
Ask for the source list and how each is accessed. Official APIs and licensed feeds survive; scraping-based coverage breaks without notice and can breach platform terms you inherit. Check the sources your market uses, UK review platforms, the forums that matter to you, not the longest list.
Classification: who reads the mentions?
Keyword sentiment is obsolete; insist on model-based classification and test it on your own awkward examples, sarcasm included, during the trial. Ask whether sentiment is scored toward your brand specifically, and whether humans can correct it.
Alerting: will the right person know in time?
Look for severity-based alerts, volume-spike detection and routing to named owners, not a single feed everyone ignores. The tool's job is making response fast; dashboards are secondary.
Compliance: can you defend it?
Where is data hosted, how long is it retained, can individual mentions be deleted on request, and does collection respect platform terms? You inherit the tool's practices in any regulatory conversation.
Cost: against what alternative?
Price it against the manual hours it replaces and the single bad week it can prevent. And check the exit: your mention history should be exportable, because switching tools should not mean amnesia.
MyView watches every mention of your brand and tells you what needs a reply.
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