Specialization in Social Media Monitoring

As social media sites are being used as an integral part of firm's digital marketing campaigns, monitoring and tracking tools are gaining momentum as well. Marketers interested in measuring the success of their campaigns will be relying more on such tools to extract values for the metrics they are monitoring.

Tools were once specialized by their focus on social media sites: you had the twitter tools, the facebook tools. However, a new breed of tools have emerged that focus on a specialty topic, like wine for example (read below article).

But is a vertical specialization sustainable? In theory, the idea looks appealing. Each specialization has certain lingo that people use so the tools to measure it will take that into consideration and thus provide a tailored service to that vertical. However, trends in the net have always favored scale.

Eventually, i believe monitoring tools will converge towards a mega platform across sites that provides a customization interface that will allow for keying in certain keywords specific to the vertical you want to monitor. This approach has roots in both worlds and benefits from scale and customization based on industry knowledge.

http://mashable.com/2011/07/18/vertical-social-media-monitoring/