Are you looking for a social media monitoring app or social listening tool (system) that can help you monitor, track online news including social media?
There are many ways to get the best from your social media monitoring system, and having basic technical features helps minimize productivity and efficiency risks.
Before committing to a social media listening (or media monitoring system), you may want to avoid the pitfalls and using our guide will help you identify the best social media monitoring tools and technical specifications if you are seeking the best media / social listening tool in Malaysia.
Summary: Key features When Choosing the Best Media Monitoring / Social Listening Tool (System)
- Data Coverage & Availability
- Historical Data
- Real Time Data
- Clean Data
- Sentiment Accuracy
- Customized Reporting
- Automated & Semi-Automated Alerts
- Data Analyst Support
- Unlimited data and keywords
- Unlimited topics
- AI-Powered Insights
Overview
Businesses in Malaysia are in a far better position to choose ready-to-use social listening solutions and most are available as a self-service cloud-based system, offering real-time media tracking via cloud-based applications. You may purchase advanced social media listening tools from Determ that offers AI-driven insights to automate suggestions and actions, which are used by Berkshire Media to deliver quality communications strategies to its clients and businesses in Malaysia.
Most popular social media listening tools offered by Meltwater, Isentia, Synthesio, Talkwalker, Hootsuite and Brandwatch promise a wide range of technical functionalities with unlimited user access and data, but there are some levels of limitations.
Essentially, for experienced communications and marketing executives, there are two fundamental questions that you need to answer before choosing one:
- What features should be included if you need the best social listening tool?
- Or should I opt for social listening services (instead of a standalone, self-serviced system) from data-analytics companies?
If social media monitoring or listening system (tool) is your final decision due to budget constraints, there are key technical features of social listening that you need to be aware of – most of which are considered important to corporate communications managers, marketers, data analysts and top executives.
If you are hiring a team of data experts to perform media monitoring or committing to a social listening system in-house, there are technical requirements including specifications of social listening system that you need to look out for.
And our guide shares some of the technical specifications that truly help you in sourcing for the best social listening tools.
Social Media Monitoring System: Top 10 technical features
Discover the essential system functionalities of a social media monitoring system that are useful for deep-dive media monitoring activities – be it for daily issues management, market research, serious intelligence tracking, spotting new trends or reducing reputation risks and other applications.
1) Data Coverage & Availability
Data coverage is the single most important criteria in a social media monitoring system. Ideally, choose a social media monitoring system that delivers the highest amount of data (mentions or buzz) for a set of topics (or given keywords).
When assessing the data availability of a media monitoring system, make sure the data are well represented equally across key social media platforms – notably Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter), news websites, news aggregators, forums, Instagram and others.
Having less data from social media monitoring system is one of the greatest pitfall or risk that affects your key output metrices – eg: user engagement, sentiment, and even pose greater risks of underestimating customer-related issues or topics that affect overall brand reputation. So when evaluating two social monitoring system, the system which show the lowest data (coverage) is the one that you should avoid.
Here is an illustrative example of how data availability (expressed in total mentions) impacts the output accuracy of key monitoring metrices such sentiment score.
| Total mentions (for a given set of keywords within a topic) | Overall Sentiment Score | |
| Social Media Monitoring System (A) | 10,000 | Positive: 60% Negative: 35% Neutral: 5% |
| Social Media Monitoring System (B) | 5,321 | Positive: 40% Neutral: 42% Neutral: 18% |
In fact, some social media monitoring system (which has poor data partnership agreement) has lower number of mentions and this can be an issue for users who seek for deeper insights from social media monitoring tools.
This is why we found that 90% of senior communications executives believe large volume of data represents better insights – even it takes manual task to populate the remaining data gaps in the analysis.
More importantly, most Malaysian companies using social media monitoring tools expect the system to display larger amount of data than what was shown in the real-time dashboard.
More social data you could extract means you increase your chance of getting more meaningful insights, especially when you are presented with a clean set of data.
Additionally, the higher amount of data correlates to higher sentiment accuracy, improving the accuracy of consumer sentiment, or improving the predictive capability to understand consumer preferences, or when managing reputation risks or anticipating future crisis.
In short, some social media monitoring tools may not deliver to whats intended due to lack of data volume and this can be addressed by other methods (eg: manual populating the social media data) needed to ensure that it meets the business requirements.
2) Historical Data
Historical data (up to 3 years) is a crucial feature in a social media monitoring system because it provides long-term insights, trend analysis, and benchmark comparisons that help organizations make informed decisions.
With the exception of companies such as Berkshire Media, most social media monitoring tools are not equipped with historical data access, making it less impactful to marketers to view the history and lesson learnt.
For experience users, access to historical data and past conversations from a social media listening tool allows businesses to:
- Identify trends and patterns – Understand shifts in public sentiment, industry changes, or recurring issues.
- Measure campaign effectiveness – Compare past and present performance to refine future strategies.
- Detect crises early – Analyze past crisis responses, effectiveness and anticipate potential risks over recurring issues that has happened in the past.
- Improve competitor analysis – Track historical brand mentions and competitor movements over time give competitive edge to marketers.
Not having historical data poses risks, such as lack of context, missed trends, missed opportunities and limited crisis preparedness, leading to poor decision-making and reactive strategies instead of proactive planning. Without historical data, businesses are essentially operating blind to past insights, making it harder to adapt and strategize effectively.
3) Real Time Data
Social listening tools from companies such as Isentia, Meltwater, Talkwalker, Brandwatch and Hootsuite offers real-time tracking of data across multiple platforms, although in reality there will be some delays that are tolerable to most end users.
Whilst real-time tracking is useful to end users, the hourly-data may not bring much value to the end users knowing that most news-driven conversation will take 4-5 hours before you can get a full picture of the total volume of mentions, or reaction from the public (netizens).
Real-time media monitoring is a standard feature that is offered by 99% of the companies in Malaysia. But the icing of the cake is, does the system capture 100% of what being posted on digital platforms?
The back-end architecture of any social media listening tool often have technical performance issues and there is no a single “best social listening tool” by any media monitoring companies in Malaysia.
According to experts, there lagging issues associated with 3rd party data providers such as Meta or Twitter as the servers are not responding as fast it should compared to 10 years ago. The cost cutting measures mean, there will be delays in the real-time performance that affects majority of news and social media monitoring activities globally.
Additionally, please be aware that the term real-time monitoring data often refers to “almost real-time” with delays up to 5-10 minutes in reality before the dashboard is refreshed with a new set of data from news, social media posts and others. The issue sometimes lies in the API server that are used to feed the data and the issue often is out of control by the monitoring companies.
4) Clean Data
Clean data is crucial in any social media monitoring system to ensure accurate insights, meaningful sentiment analysis, and effective decision-making.
Noisy data—such as spam, irrelevant mentions, duplicate posts, and bot-generated content—can distort results, leading to misleading conclusions and ineffective marketing strategies.
Most social media monitoring tool contains 40% worth of data that is irrelevant, making it challenging for end users, PR executives and marketers to make informed decision about the situation. Proactive issue or crisis management requires a set of clean data to make better prediction about the future.
That is why having a clean dataset in any social media tool is considered a highly important feature and crucial for large organizations such as Government Ministries, public-listed companies and entities in Malaysia.
Choose a social media monitoring tool that has capabilities to remove noisy data or companies that offer data cleaning as part of its social listening package. Most businesses in Malaysia value clean data.
To address this inherent legacy issue of “noisy data”, businesses should invest in monitoring systems with advanced AI-driven filtering, natural language processing (NLP), and customizable keyword exclusions.
Most social listening tools in Malaysia have issues of noisy data from its automated alerts and dashboards, and this does not help businesses to get greater insights.
Implementing machine learning models and having human-assisted (or experienced analyts) to detect spam and non-relevant content, combined with human oversight, helps refine the data stream, ensuring that insights derived from social listening are reliable and actionable.
5) Sentiment Accuracy on Multilingual Language
Sentiment data processing (or sentiment analytics) is crucial in social media monitoring or when tracking news media because it helps businesses and organizations understand public perception, track brand reputation, and respond to customer feedback effectively.
However, sentiment analysis often suffers from inaccuracy due to the complexity of multiple language used to express human emotions, sarcasm, slang, and multilingual content. Our analysis revealed that social media monitoring tools in Malaysia offer best functionalities, features, real-time tracking but often with far less sentiment accuracy below 50% due to the Malay-centric linguistic issues that hamper the accuracy performance from the automated-sentiment detection approach.
Automated-sentiment detection from real-time social listening tools provide less than 50% sentiment accuracy, making it challenging to get the best social insights if you are managing issues and reputation risks. It doesn’t help much.
There truth is, not all social media listening tools are able to process Malay slangs, or mixed Malay-English languages due to the inherent algorithmic limitation that was purely designed to detect sentiment in English.
Our analysis showed even well-known social media companies such as Meltwater may struggle to achieve a high degree of sentiment accuracy and the lack of ability to process local slangs in Malay and English could be a deterrent for most users to choose foreign-owned social media listening tools.
Here is a summary of sentiment accuracy of popular social listening tools in the market:
| Types of Social Media Monitoring System | Sentiment Detection Approach | Sentiment Accuracy on Malay Social Media Text and Multi-lingual text |
| Social Media Tool (System A) | Automated Sentiment AI-driven Detection Algorithm | 50%-60% |
| Social Media Tool (System B) | Semi-automated human supervised AI-driven algorithm | 95-99% |
- AI and NLP Advancements – Leveraging deep learning models that improve contextual understanding.
- Hybrid Analysis – Combining automated sentiment detection with human validation for better precision.
- Industry-Specific Training – Customizing models with domain-specific datasets to improve accuracy.
- Continuous Model Updates – Refining algorithms with real-time data to adapt to evolving language patterns.
Therefore, choosing a media monitoring system that prioritizes high-accuracy sentiment detection ensures more reliable insights, leading to better decision-making and crisis management. This is amongst the important criteria if you need the best news or social media monitoring solution.
6) Customized Reporting
Social media tools often offer feature such as custom reporting (whether in PDF, PowerPoint or other format), but most are based on ready-to-use widgets that allow users to click-n-drop the required tables or charts.
Custom reports are amongst the top features of a social listening tool as it allows operational flexibility to cater for bespoke reporting requirements. These custom reports often require more than basic pie charts, bar charts or trend line charts – and these often are offered by companies who are experienced in data analytics.
Automated-custom reporting alerts in social media listening tool is an important feature, but in reality, you need more customized reporting options with custom line and bar charts, tables, and others.
There are three types of custom reporting in social media listening tools that you need to, each to serve different functions, objectives and benefits as shown in the table below.
| News & Social Listening Reporting Functionalities | Format | Useful For |
| Fully Automated Reports | PDF, | Basic Users |
| Semi-Automated | PDF, PowerPoint | Intermediate Users |
| Custom Reports | PowerBI, Tableau, Powerpoint | Advance Users |
Key features included in social media monitoring reports
| Social Listening Reporting features | Level of Importance to The End User |
| Volumetric Trendline Chart | Very Important |
| Sentiment Breakdown Chart | Very Important |
| Sentiment Analysis TimeLine Chart | Very Important |
| Channel (Platform) Breakdown Chart | Very Important |
| Top influencers (authors) | Important |
| Top Virality Score | Important |
| Predictive Regression Line Chart | Nice to have |
| Emotions Analysis Trendline Chart | Important |
| Net Sentiment Score Chart & Tables | Important |
| Deep-Dive Insights | Very Important |
| Written Summary | Important |
| Recommendations & Action Plans | Very Important |
| Reputation Risk Impact Score | Very Important |
| Brand Risk | Very Important |
| Volume Breakdown by Platforms | Important |
| Total Unique Authors | Important |
| Breakdown of Earned vs Paid Media | Important |
| Keyword Cloud | Nice to have |
| Location | Nice to have |
| Insights by Topic | Very Important |
7) Automated and Semi-Automated (Whatsapp) Alerts
Whatsapp alerts is another feature that is equally but largely important when choosing social listening tool provider in Malaysia. Berkshire Media is amongst the few companies that offer whatsap alerts to clients, allowing the clients to custom curate the alerts that they need into digestable easy-to-read format.
Berkshire Media offers beyond social listening tool by curating daily Whatsapp alerts for daily reports to ease our client needs, and reduce time to read tons of email. This helps reduce your daily clutter and improve productivity.
This highly customizable reporting daily alerts are considered valuable and high-value to reduce your time when managing complex issues, or when your organization involves monitoring multiple issues (eg: more than 10 various types of issues) and 20 or 50 more topics that span across multiple subsidiaries and departments.
This feature (of semi-automated) Whatsapp alerts are best when performed by experienced domain analysts to ensure summarization of relevant insights. According to data analytics experts, this human-assisted alert approach is deemed one of the best features you should consider when choosing social media monitoring tool in 2025.
8) Data Analyst Support
Having a social media listening tool may be one part of the equation and if it is managed by inexperienced users, more often than not you may not deliver the best output in terms of social insights that you need.
Most social media tool companies struggle with finding data analysts who have accumulated deep-dive experience in using social listening tools or at least demonstrated more than 5 years in managing reputation risks, issues and research, especially in a specific industry.
“The best social media listening companies have a minimum of 5-10 years of experience in issue management, or analyzing social media data in the area of reputation risks” said Liz Kamaruddin, a former Managing Director of FTI Consulting who manages reputation issues for top companies in Malaysia and Singapore.
She added that most analysts are clueless when interpreting data from social media or news monitoring reports, and there is a reason why experienced PR managers partner with the agencies that are well-versed in a particular industry.
Never subscribe to a social listening company that do not have the capability to provide data analyst support. This may disrupt your operations if you having a small in-house team.
In short, domain-experienced analysts are rare but data analytics media monitoring companies such as Berkshire Media offer such level of deep-dive services backed by more than 10 years in industry verticals such as banking, financial industry, automotive and the public sector in Malaysia.
9) Unlimited data and keywords
Having unlimited Boolean keywords and data in a social media monitoring system is crucial because it allows organizations to filter, track, and analyze online conversations with precision. With flexible Boolean logic, users can create highly specific queries to capture relevant insights while reducing noise, ensuring that only meaningful data is processed.
Ideally, choose a social media monitoring system with no keyword or data limits to ensures you’re your organization stay ahead of trends, competitors, and crises, making it an essential tool for data-driven decision-making.
Social listening tool with unlimited data option are often pricey, but it is well worth it for large organizations such as banks, government or even public listed companies.
This can be handy if you need to explore topics outside your brand mentions, or when performing benchmarking research exercise that touches other brands. Such broad and deep-dive social analytics may require a larger set of data, hence this is where unlimited data and keywords become crucially important when choosing a system or tool.
Remember, you are not using social listening to track your own brand mentions, but your competitors too. So choose “unlimited keywords or data” option from social listening system providers if you can afford it.
10) Unlimited Topics
Some social listening tools have limited topics due to limited data quota. And this is the type of social listening system that you want to avoid.
In reality, having unlimited topic creation allows you be flexible when categorizing your data breakdown into logical categorization that meets your stakeholders, departments and various organization functions.
While it is important to some degree, social media monitoring tool mostly comes with topics that be created, added, deleted and often you require less than 20-30 topics to be productive and efficient. These number of topics will cover mostly all possible scenarios, conditions and crisis from our experience of handling various clients and industries over the last 10 year or so.
Guide on how many topics are relevant in each industry.
To gauge how many topics you need to monitor on social / digital media platforms, we have summarized it for you based on our 10 years worth of social media monitoring experience across 100 brands and projects.
| Industry | Total Estimated Number of Topics You Need |
| Oil and Gas | 10-20 |
| Hospitality | 5 |
| FMCG | 5 |
| Aviation | 5-10 |
| Automotive | 5-10 |
| Government – Federal Ministries | 5-10 |
| Government – State Agencies | 5-10 |
| Government – Regulators & Enforcement | 10-20 |
| F&B | 5 |
| Agriculture | 5 |
| Banking and Financial Industry | 5-10 |
| Real Estate | 5 |
| Technology | 5-10 |
| Business Services | 5-10 |
11) AI-Powered Insights
Artificial Intelligence (AI) are now used in some social media listening tools and the AI-driven system powers the actionable insights. By subscribing to social media monitoring tools together with a robust data-processing framework used by Berkshire Media, you may get the best AI-driven recommendations from social data directly to your email, improving your productivity by 50%.
At Berkshire Media, we offer AI-driven services using the best social listening tool to clients who value time, improving faster reaction by focusing on actions to improve customer loyalty, or mitigate negative perception.
AI-driven actions from sentiment analysis and machine learning have benefited most businesses, especially if you are managing complex issues, or when predicting perception trends related to broad range of topics that are impacting your business (eg: economy, consumer buying behaviour, geopolitics, policy changes, etc).
Parting Thoughts
Our long list of features of a social media listening tool brings greater insights into the industry standard should you opt for a system or applications that meet basic to advance user requirements.
Large organizations and businesses in Malaysia seek more from social listening tools and there are not much development besides the promises of a AI-driven insights. However at this point, AI-driven recommendations and insights from social media monitoring system or social listening tools offer basic output that may not be suitable for advance users, PR executives or marketers.
The industry at large still dependent on experienced analysts and humans to interpret data into actionable insights. And only few niche data analytics companies that can extract the best out of the social listening tools in Malaysia.
Why Trust Us?
Berkshire Media is a market leader for social listening and media monitoring solutions in Malaysia.
We have more than 12 years of media monitoring and data analytics experience with the best social media and news media monitoring tools in the market, enabling our team to analyze millions worth of social data for more than 100 brands and clients in Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.
We deploy a tool-agnostic approach in assessing more than 10 social media tools and monitoring system including but not limited to Hootsuite, Synthesio, Radian 6, Meltwater, Isentia and many other systems.
Our company develops ground-breaking bespoke media monitoring and issue management solutions using our proprietary sentiment detection engine SENTIROBO and AI-driven data processing framework that can complement the output of any social media monitoring systems, tools and applications.
Additionally, we assess various system functionalities and our team of data experts are end-users themselves, enabling a more robust assessment to be done to identify the best features of a social media monitoring system for businesses. This helps to unlock more data-driven insights for marketers and PR strategies.
About the Author
Shahid Shayaa is the founder and managing director of Berkshire Media. He specializes in data-driven communication strategies and insights using social data analytics, social media monitoring tools and machine learning text algorithms for more than 13 years. As an expert in the field of media monitoring, issue management and managing reputation risks for companies, he is involved in various research studies in this field and published various scientific papers on social data analytics, sentiment analysis and back-end algorithms on consumer sentiment, emotions and behaviour for marketers and campaign managers.
His research work and studies have been cited more than 467 times, inspiring new research in the field of social analytics in Malaysia. You may view his work here.
