Viennese Swat.io Launches Social Media Monitoring Tool In Collaboration With Ubermetrics

How would you describe Swat.io in a few words?

Swat.io is the enterprise & agency suite for social media marketing teams. We cover all needs in social media management – community management, content planning & publishing, analytics and most recently monitoring.

As you mention, you’ve recently launched a new monitoring solution to track activities on various social networks. What can you tell us about the tool?

With social media monitoring, you can listen to what people on social media are saying about your brand, products, competitors or any industry related topic, even if your social media accounts have not been mentioned/tagged specifically. Of course, collecting these mentions from all relevant social media platforms is only the start. The secret sauce here is, that we’ve been integrating monitoring with our battle-proven Ticket Inbox. This allows to effectively filter for relevant results and forward conversations to the right team member, who can then enter the conversation. Swat.io Social Media Monitoring, enables our customers to be where relevant communication is happening and grow their relationships with people.

The Ticket Inbox was expanded with the help of Ubermetrics, a Berlin-based company focused on data-based analysis. From your experience, how important is data and what are some of the most relevant metrics to track?

Yes, we’ve joined forces with Ubermetrics to build the social media monitoring features of our Ticket Inbox. While we probably would have been able to pull off the “social media” part of monitoring ourselves, Ubermetrics is an established monitoring player that will allow us to extend monitoring beyond social to other online channels (blogs, news, forums, etc.) and even TV, radio, and print.

Obviously, for a tool like Swat.io, external data from the social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is a fundamental building block for our service. Before selecting Ubermetrics, we’ve evaluated several data providers over the course of a month. We’ve specifically tested for completeness in search results, API performance and overall stability of service. All metrics aside: if you’re planning a deep & longterm integration like we did with Ubermetrics, I’d also recommend checking for cultural compatibility with your partner, especially between the development teams.

Are you using the Ticket Inbox internally? How does that affect the viewpoints of your development team?

Yes, of course – I’m a big believer in the “eating your own dogfood” mentality! We’re using Swat.io internally to forward customer requests on social media to our customer care guys, we’re monitoring our brand name, we plan & collaborate on content between our marketing and sales teams, and yes, we even have the odd post approved by me! 😉

Using our own software is key to learn about existing inadequacies of the app and improvements in the user interface. However, it can never replace talking to our users. Since our own company is much smaller than most of our customers, our brand’s exposure on social media is only a fraction of, let’s say, ARD or ORF (German & Austrian public broadcasters, Ed.). It is, therefore, a key to do customer development and constantly talk to customers to decide what goes on the roadmap.

As you work closely with corporates, what can startups learn from bigger players?

Many startups and growing companies can take a page from more established companies’ books in terms of financial planning and reporting. This is especially dangerous for bootstrapped and profitable companies like ours. There’s really no one to keep your financials in check, except you, the founders. Having a rough plan what you’re going to spend next year in development, marketing, sales is key. Being a startup you’ll still be able to adjust/adapt your plan anytime you need to, but navigating without a plan at all could prove deadly.

With many startups and agencies focusing on concepts and applications for social media – what makes Swat.io stand out of the crowd? What is the key differentiator?

Swat.io shines most in areas with a high volume of interactions and a high need for collaboration. With Swat.io we’ve decided to clearly focus on the upper end within the broad range of social media tools – we want to build the best, integrated management suite for larger companies and their teams’ specific requirements.

While many smaller companies or freelancers are doing great work using out-of-the-box tools like the Facebook Page manager or free/cheap tools like Buffer, there is always a point where these approaches don’t cut it anymore. When social media management and publishing is a joint effort done by a team (maybe even distributed across an internal team, external agencies etc.), having a central dashboard and integrated workflows is a must. The same goes for the volume of interactions: while it’s perfectly fine to reply to a handful incoming private messages per day without any tool, requirements change when you’re a mobile network provider who has got to handle hundreds of customer interactions each day on social media. Besides that, stability, performance, and most importantly good customer service are key differentiators that work for us even when compared to our biggest, VC-backed, competitors.

Social media marketing is a strong focus for the majority of B2C as well as B2B startups. What are the most common pitfalls and where do you see opportunities?

For B2B brands like Swat.io, I’d say lack of authenticity and lack of stamina. Successful social media marketing (almost) never comes overnight but is a long-term investment over many years. This is especially true when budgets for paid reach are limited and competition for eyeballs is fierce – and both is true for most B2B startups.

For B2C brands, I’d say many social media marketers are still focusing too much on brand awareness while neglecting the performance/measurement aspect. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on paid reach on social media but not earning enough ROI on it (in general, this is getting better though).

Michael, what’s next for Swat.io?

Bring out the crystal ball! 😉 One aspect of the wonderful world of social media marketing is that it’s never going to be boring for a tool vendor like we are. There are always new content formats to include, emerging social media platforms and to integrate, obsolete ones to deprecated etc.

On the other hand, there are some areas in social media marketing we haven’t yet touched with Swat.io – advertising and Social CRM being just the most obvious ones. On the business side, we’re looking forward to extending our customer base beyond SW/A/G (Switzerland/Austria/Germany) more aggressively in 2018 – so it most definitely will be an exciting year ahead 🙂

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