The Two Categories of Social Media Monitoring Tools

You can drop most social media monitoring tools into two different categories. The first category is Quantitative, and the second is Qualitative. What do we mean by that? Quantitative tools measure data like number of Twitter followers, number of Facebook fans, frequency of mentions on blogs, and other metrics that involve specific numbers. Qualitative tools measure the sentiment behind the comments. In other words, they provide you with insights into how your followers feel about your product or service.

By breaking the kinds of tools into these two categories—quantitative and qualitative—you are able to organize your program a little better and keep things streamlined. There are some tools that fall into both categories, but to keep things simple, I segment the tools into one category or the other.