Sprout Social

Crimson Hexagon

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)


Crimson Hexagon - Sprout Social
  • Pros

    Top-notch sentiment analysis rooted in machine learning algorithm. Live social stream monitoring. Best interactive visualizations for keyword and hashtag data.
  • Cons

    Too expensive for SMBs. Doesn't lack for any core functionality, but listening metrics and influencer analytics lack creativity and deeper-dive data.
  • Bottom Line

    Crimson Hexagon is a top-tier social media analytics tool for enterprises, with a glossy interface and exceptional sentiment analysis.

Crimson Hexagon (which begins at $2,000 per month) is an enterprise-scale social media analytics platform with powerhouse social listening and influencer identification tools targeting social media marketers at large businesses. Both Crimson Hexagon and Editors' Choices Synthesio and Sysomos are refined offerings aimed squarely at global brands, capable of providing deep insight around how consumers view and interact with those brands on social media—what they're saying, thinking, feeling, and how enterprises can use those insights to influence their business decisions.

Stacked up against the other platforms I tested, Crimson Hexagon finishes near the top in all the main social analytics categories, from listening and sentiment analysis to influencer and topic monitoring across an array of reporting options and data visualizations. Crimson Hexagon is not as affordable for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) as Brand24 and doesn't offer a combined platform for analytics and publishing like Buffer for Business or Editors' Choice for SMBs Sprout Social. But, as with Synthesio, its comprehensive and mature analytics and monitoring capabilities are on a level far above the less expensive offerings.

Though some of its data visualization and reporting options have an edge over Synthesio and Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon can't match the Editors' Choice winners for depth of community analysis and doesn't offer quite the same level of business ROI metrics, though it's not far behind. Crimson Hexagon may fall just short of the Editors' Choice, but its clear strengths and cost-effective monitoring as an enterprise social media analytics platform make it well worth consideration.

Crimson Hexagon- Monitors Dashboard

Pricing and Setup

Crimson Hexagon introductory packages start at $2,000 per month and, unlike the different tiers of Brand24 include unlimited users, mentions, and access to historical data from the start. There's also unlimited access to public training workshops and Crimson Hexagon's online learning center. Though it doesn't offer built-in publishing, the platform has a freely available application programming interface (API) for enterprises to code custom integrations to other services.

Unlike Synthesio, which licenses each dashboard individually, Crimson Hexagon offers three different types of dashboards called "Monitors" and includes a significant allotment of them in the $2,000 package. Crimson Hexagon focuses on three primary use cases: brand management, campaign planning, and advertising campaign effectiveness, and each of its dashboard types—Buzz Monitors, Opinion Monitors, and Social Account Monitors—frame social data from one of those perspectives. The Buzz Monitor is along the lines of traditional social listening, designed to track mentions and discussion around a particular keyword-driven conversation.

To run a Buzz Monitor, I added a few keywords around Coca-Cola's #ShareACoke campaign. You can enter keywords using the guided query builder, or use the Free-Form Query option to write complex searches in Boolean logic. When toggling data sources on and off, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram hashtags, Google+, and (still in beta) Tumblr are listed as available sources, and there are also checkboxes for blogs, forums, comments, news, and reviews. Crimson Hexagon can also pull data from popular international social networks including Sina Weibo and VK (originally VKontakte).

From there, I got options to set a date range, limit or exclude languages or locations, and add "author interests" to further specify keywords specifically for Twitter. Crimson Hexagon is also the only platform I tested with an option to enable live streaming results rather than analyzing static data. The query builder is on par with Synthesio's, though neither offers quite the granular control over complex search parameters found in Talkwalker.

Crimson Hexagon- Auto Sentiment Analysis

Opinion Monitors work in tandem with Buzz Monitors for a dynamic representation of audience sentiment. The setup is similar to a Buzz analysis, but with an added element of setting up custom categories to teach Crimson Hexagon's BrightView machine-learning algorithm what a specific sentiment like "Intent to Purchase" means. The Opinion Monitor lets you create different categories and provide a subset of 10 to 20 posts per category for the algorithm to crawl, then extrapolates that sample size to the full database of posts to gauge a sentiment category. You can "Train More Posts" at any time to refine the BrightView algorithm by opening the Manage tab on the top right of the interface while in the Opinion Monitor. The manual process of picking categories and choosing representative posts takes a little time, but the custom sentiment analytics you get make it well worth it.

Finally, there are the Social Account Monitors. These are limited to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but give you detailed growth, engagement, audience, and trending topic analytics on a specific Twitter handle, Facebook page, or Instagram account. It's the sort of inside-out analytics, starting with the posts and follow growth and building out to wider reach and engagement numbers, of which a newer offering like Buffer for Business only scratches the surface. A Social Account Monitor also lets you run a complete social account analysis on a competitor; your business doesn't need to own the social presence the monitor crawls. Setup for this monitor was the quickest; select the page, account or handle, choose a date range, and the monitor populates in a minute or two.

The $2,000 Crimson Hexagon package gives you a total of 10 Buzz or Opinion Monitors and an additional 12 Social Account Monitors. For that many dashboards, Crimson Hexagon may end up being a more cost-effective option than Synthesio or the Corporate and Enterprise tiers of Talkwalker for businesses that plan on creating a large number of dashboards for tracking individual social campaigns.

Crimson Hexagon also released a new separate product this past year called HelioSight, which can run ad-hoc searches without the use of structured Boolean queries. A social search tool for the less experienced brand manager or social marketer, HelioSight can run complex queries in plain language, and delivers the results in card-based shareable visual reports called Insight Cards.

Insight Cards are mobile-responsive, and can be filtered by gender, sentiment, location, interest, language, or custom time frame. The cards display specialized reporting results such as Volume & Sentiment, Demographics (gender, age, and location), Top Hashtags, Top Influencers, Most Retweeted posts, and Top Interests, and is available in multiple packages of the platform as an added social analytics capability.

An Enterprise Analytics Tool Suite

Each Monitor type uses Crimson Hexagon's analytics to draw different conclusions about a business's social presences, but you get similar tooling and reporting features in each dashboard. The first metric you see in a Buzz Monitor is its basic sentiment analysis, presented in an interactive graph with a few charting options gauging positive, negative, and neutral sentiment. It's a fine enough visualization and the basic sentiment analytics are comparable to the ones you'll find in Brand24 Premium, Synthesio, and basic Talkwalker sentiment before adding that package's Smart Themes. Given the custom sentiment categories and far deeper opinion-based analytics you get in the Opinion Monitor, I found this basic sentiment graph superfluous.

The same goes for the Net Sentiment tab further down, though at least that tool allows you to compare sentiment between two monitors. On that note, the comparison tool set is pretty substantial. Crimson Hexagon lets you compare multiple monitors, which can include monitors you've generated of competitors' social presences, and see head-to-head data on total engagement, share of voice on different topics, and basic sentiment. I found these comparison tools most useful in the Opinion Monitor, where I was able to bring in the more specific custom sentiment categories I created.

The rest of the Buzz Monitor's social metrics tab is pretty standard. Interactive line and bar graphs chart post volume over time across social presences on queried keywords and topics, with a Content Sources tool slicing those same bars into traffic percentages from various sources, though Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook took up the lion's share, at least in the #ShareACoke query I ran. In the Twitter tab itself, you get a list of users with the top mentions, hashtags, and retweets. These basic metrics are displayed similarly in the Opinion and Social Account Monitors along with total engagement.

In its latest platform updates, Crimson Hexagon has greatly improved sentiment analysis, image analysis, and logo-based brand recognition. A new Emotion Analysis feature, available in Buzz and Social Account Monitors, goes beyond positive and negative set sentiment by analyzing emotions including anger, fear, disgust, joy, surprise, and sadness in a social post using machine learning algorithms. The improved image analysis can detect brand mentions and impressions in images, where Crimson Hexagon could previously perform only text analysis.

Crimson Hexagon clearly sees Twitter as the focal point of its analytics capabilities, and the dashboards reflect that. Enterprises will get the information they need from these basic listening tools, but I found them to be the most conventional analytics reporting Crimson Hexagon offered. Synthesio and Talkwalker provide some deeper metrics and more creative reporting visualizations in this department.

Crimson Hexagon- Social Topic Wheel

One area where Crimson Hexagon really stands out is in its visualization options for the keyword, hashtag, or sentiment data in a social conversation. Each of the dashboards includes an Explore tab in the left-hand navigation with visualization tools including a Topic Wheel, Clusters, Word Cloud, and Topic Waves. In the same way that Synthesio's Psychographics and Ecoystem visualizations enable unparalleled community analysis, Crimson Hexagon's Explore tools can take the pulse of a conversation. You can add a Quick Filter in the top right corner to streamline results by post type, source, and so on.

In my #ShareACoke Buzz Monitor, the Topic Wheel loaded a pie chart of keywords related to the hashtag, sized in chunks by post frequency and linking to a post list when I clicked on a segment. Clusters offers an animated graphic of overlapping bubbles with the same terms, showing which popular keywords are associated with a hashtag. The Word Cloud visualization is on par with those you'll find in Talkwalker and Synthesio, though I did find myself wishing, as in Synthesio, that a full dashboard would pop up around a particular word instead of a link to a post list. I found Topic Waves a great tool for visualizing the popularity of different hashtags over time, compared against each other with peaks and valleys. If your business is monitoring marketing campaigns for a few new products, these word visualizations are a great way to show how much exposure you're getting.

Crimson Hexagon's audience analysis and demographics capabilities are equally solid, with its Affinities tool standing out particularly. Affinities map different types of segments and interest groups within the query topics or accounts you're looking at. When I clicked into the tab, I found myself looking at a scatter plot of keywords in differently sized circles, comparing the frequency of keywords within specific audiences on the left charted against frequency of those topics across all of Twitter on the right. It's a way to map the interests of the audience you're capturing with a conversation, and the tool also let me tag individual authors for influencer identification, to sort into user groups for targeted campaigns. The Affinities tool and Demographics tab (with basic age, race, and gender breakdowns) don't let you do market segmenting as clearly and effectively as Synthesio's Psychographics, but they're useful tools all the same.

There's also an Authors tab listing your most influential social authors and how many impressions their posts are getting, and a rather bare-bones Geography tab with an interactive world map of post concentration in different companies. These functions worked well and get the analytics across, but lack the creativity or deeper drilldowns to compete with the more robust influencer reporting and global heat maps with Google Analytics integration found in Synthesio and Talkwalker.

Crimson Hexagon- Opinion Monitor Brand Sentiment

A Workspace for Your Social Data
Beyond the three types of Monitors, Crimson Hexagon lets you drag and drop any graph or metric into a custom dashboard called a Workspace. Workspace creation is unlimited, and the dashboards can be exported directly as PowerPoint presentations. Other export options for all analytics graphs and reporting include Excel, exporting as an image, or bulk exporting an entire monitor's posts. Alerting capabilities include daily email digests or alerts based on post or sentiment thresholds to an unlimited number of users.

There's also a beta feature called Custom Segments that lets team members add Twitter handles—or, for some reason, specific Tumblr blogs—to a custom audience group you can then load into different monitors for analysis. You can also create a segment from followers of a specific Twitter user. Segments are another example of Crimson Hexagon's emphasis on Twitter. It's the most capable platform I tested for Twitter-specific insights, but I would've liked to see a beta capability like Segments extend to influential social users and groups on Facebook or Instagram as well. Crimson Hexagon and Sysomos were also the only platforms to go out of their way to embrace Tumblr, an intriguing focus for an enterprise-level social analytics service, but one with some social listening value for key millennial audience segments.

I used the Workspace and Segment features to accentuate Crimson Hexagon's greatest strength: the detailed custom sentiment analysis available in an Opinion Monitor. Crimson Hexagon doesn't possess Synthesio's breadth of ROI analytics correlated to business value, but its sentiment analysis is peerless. In an Opinion Monitor on brand sentiment for Coors Light, the analysis broke down positive and negative sentiment into categories such as "General Positive/Favorite Beer," "Craving/Intent to Purchase/Consume," "Praising Marketing and Criticizing Marketing," and "Tastes Terrible/Watery." No other social media analytics platform I tested distilled sentiment analytics into as directly relatable marketing data about the social perception of brands.

Overall, Crimson Hexagon offers exceptional analytics, social listening, and influencer identification capabilities, particularly in brand sentiment analysis and keyword/hashtag visualizations. Though it's a pricey service, it gives enterprise-scale organizations a complete pane of glass from which to monitor their social audience, branding, and presences using a sleek interface and an array of appealing visualizations. When it comes to deeper analytics around listening metrics, influencers, community analysis, and tangible ROI reporting, it can't quite match the power of Editors' Choices Synthesio and Sysomos. Yet for a global brand or enterprise marketing company tracking an array of products with a particular eye for social sentiment analysis, Crimson Hexagon may be the most capable and cost-effective option.

Crimson Hexagon- Influencer Breakdown