I was discussing with an agency client the other day Sentiment Metrics reach in terms of how much source data we index compared to leading blog search engines such as Google blog search and Technorati.
We did some comparisons across three of the terms they were monitoring and here are the results (terms not shown to protect their clients)!To get the raw numbers of social media mentions and online media mentions I checked in Sentiment Metrics reporting interface and database manually.
To get the raw numbers on Google blog search I did an advanced search. Selected the last month of data , English, and entered the phrase in the exact phrase box. Once the search was run I clicked the links at the bottom of the page until I got to the last page of results as their result count can not be trusted. I then recorded the number at the bottom of the page “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the XXX already displayed.” As this shows their entire index for this phrase without duplicates. See: http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2008/02/28/google-blogsearch-howto/ Section: Second problem: total results estimate.
To get raw numbers from Technorati I ran the query and looked at the numbers chart in the bottom right and added the total manually.
| Phrase |
Google Blog |
Technorati |
Sentiment Metrics Reports (after spam and relevance filtering) |
Sentiment Metrics Database |
| 1 |
277 |
Approx 55 |
296 |
484 |
| 2 |
139 |
Approx 19 |
165 (only 20 days data) |
322 |
| 3 |
512 |
Not possible |
573 (only 20 days data) |
7842 |
Obviously there is a lot more to Sentiment Metrics than just raw numbers such as our Sentiment, Demographic and influencer analysis. However on just the simple metric of raw numbers you can see for all three terms we outperformed the two blog search engines. Our client was happy to confirm this!