Monitoring Queensland Health with Socialmention and Topsy

Socialmention and Topsy are social media monitoring tools that functions like a search engine which only searches through a variety of social media technologies such as facebook, twitter, and youtube. These two tools will be used to monitor and anaylse Queensland Health’s social media presence.

Using Socialmention (click here)

It was difficult to pinpoint an accurate search for Queensland Health as it contains two words. When I searched for Queensland Health, Socialmention would generate searches solely for ‘Health’ or solely for ‘Queensland’.  After further searching, I discovered that ‘qldhealth’ yielded better results as this is ‘Queensland Health’s twitter hashtag code. Through viewing the results gathered, it is evident that a majority of the tweets are coming from the ‘Queensland Heath’s Twitter page. This indicates that ‘Queensland Health’ is regularly posting and is attempting to build a relationship with the public. Socialmention also have some analysis criteria which is useful when trying to understand ‘Queensland Health’s current social media presence. These criteria basically determine how positive/negative the responses are, how likely the people will repeatedly talk about the organisation, how many unique authors are there, and how likely the organisation will be discussed in social media. Another useful feature is that Socialmention has is the ability to see how many responses are coming from different types of social media platforms. In this case, there were 35 responses from Twitter, 13 responses from Friendfeed, and 10 from Facebook. This indicates that Twitter is the dominant social media platform for Queensland Health with Friendfeed as the second most dominant.

Using Topsy (click here)

Unlike Socialmention, Topsy gave better search results when I used the search phrase “Queensland Health”. It also appears to have a larger search result with around 600 results (compared to Socialmention’s search result of 50) gathered from a variety of news websites and twitter. A nice feature of Topsy is the graph (click here) which illustrates how many tweets are occurring on a specific day. When I moved my cursor along the orange line of the graph, it displays comments that were posted on that day. This is good when I want to quickly see what kind of responses Queensland Health was getting on that day and to judge if these comments are positive or negative.

Limitations

A limitation of using Socialmention and Topsy is the reliability of the positive/negative responses. For instance how can they determine if these comments are positive or negative on such a massive scale? Upon further research I discovered that a majority of positive responses for Queensland Health were in fact (in my opinion) neutral responses.

So what other free social media monitoring tools do you use? Let us know, thanks!

 

---