Tool Review: Social listening software Infegy Atlas

As a planner, it’s your job to be curious, and with a PR background in social/digital I’ve always been a fan of social listening insights (ask the PrettyGreen office – I even made a drunken toast ‘To data!’ at our Christmas party one year…).

So, having tried out a few social listening platforms over the years, I’ve become a big advocate of Infegy Atlas. Mining billions of social and online posts dating back to 2007, we use Infegy’s data for a number of use cases at the agency: from gleaning audience insights to inform a campaign, getting a better understanding of consumer needs in a new sector, to helping us understand the impact of our work on consumers.

Some of the features that set Infegy Atlas apart for me aren’t flashy visualisations or artificial intelligence (though it has those too), but its intuitive and smart processing of social data into actionable social insight.

Conversation narratives and themes help to quickly identify key topics and allow you to deep dive into what’s driving these, which could help inform a brand about factors such as quality, purchase intent, trust or service. Its sentiment analysis also offers a deeper level of insight into the emotions expressed in online posts, giving a more nuanced picture of consumer feelings beyond the standard positive/neutral/negative sentiment.

The main challenge I’ve found with any social listening platform is its user-friendliness. There’s no point paying top dollar for the best data if no one knows how to use it, navigate it, or understand it. This is where Infegy Atlas excels in my opinion, with guided query writing (should you need it), a clear set of filters to refine the data, and intuitive navigation to help you quickly find the insights you’re after.

Pros

• It’s truly unlimited. Unlike most of its competitors, Infegy packages offer unlimited mentions and queries, so a brand or agency can use it without worrying about data caps or getting a query wrong and ‘wasting’ mentions.
• Anyone can use it. You don’t need to be an analyst to setup or interpret the results.
• It’s quick. Results are pretty instantaneous, so you don’t have to wait around for 30 mins for a report to load (only to realise your query wasn’t quite right and you need to re-run it).
• It’s fairly priced. In comparison with its peers, the pricing model feels reasonable for the insight you get; some social listening competitors are more than double the cost.

Cons

• Infegy Atlas doesn’t use a firehose for all social channels, meaning it won’t always capture every single social post. This is less important when being used for insights and research, but may matter more for campaign tracking or measurement.
• Like any social listening tool it takes practice to learn how to use it most efficiently and effectively, but invest some time in your curiosity and you’ll be rewarded.

Reviewed by Lucy Porter, head of planning and innovation at PR agency PrettyGreen