Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Platform

The Vendor is required to provide for an enterprise-class social media monitoring and analytics platform with real-time scanning across major and relevant online channels with full firehose-level data access.
- The platform will empower university to:
•    Monitor and analyze real-time online conversations across social, news, blogs, and forums
•    Identify sentiment shifts, emerging trends, and reputational risks
•    Benchmark performance against peer and aspirational institutions
•    Inform strategic communications, stakeholder engagement, and crisis response.
- Have an enterprise-class social media analytics platform that will provide the capabilities for the monitoring and analysis of real-time and historical online conversations across social media, news, blogs, and forums.
- The service will provide the ability to easily provide access to the platform to a broad number of students for teaching purposes while also providing extensive access to downloadable historical data for high-level academic and grant research. 
- The ideal platform will offer both an easy to navigate analytics interface powered by artificial intelligence and serve as a social media data warehouse to access publicly available posts. 
- The platform should include analytics for tracking owned and earned social media activity and assessing appropriate properties of the data including but not limited to volume, sentiment, engagement, geography, salient topics of conversation, users and content influencing conversations. 
- Provide initial technical training and responsive customer service. 
- Transparency in terms of channel firehose parameters and algorithm construction for measured variables is also requested.
- Real-Time Data Collection & Monitoring
•    Continuous monitoring of major social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit) plus online news, blogs, and forums
•    Full firehose access preferred
•    Capture of public posts, comments, and associated engagement metrics
•    Near-instant ingestion of new mentions and trends
- Advanced Search & Filtering
•    Boolean logic (advanced logic preferred), keyword grouping, and exclusion filters
•    Segmentation by geography, language, sentiment, platform, and date range
•    AI-powered entity recognition for university-related people, departments, events, and topics
- Data Capabilities & Exports
•    Access to real-time and historical data
•    Ability to download historical data via Excel and .csv files (without API)
•    Random sample downloads of historical data
•    Construction of custom datasets preferred
•    API access for raw data export
•    Compatibility with Tableau, Power BI, and other visualization tools preferred
•    Scheduled exports and automated report delivery
•    Transparent documentation of data sources and AI tools
- Sentiment & Trend Analysis
•    Automated sentiment classification with manual review/override
•    Trend tracking over time with historical lookback capability (multi-year)
- Influencer & Key Account Tracking
•    Identification of influential accounts driving university-related conversations
•    Relationship mapping between influencers, media, and audiences
•    Tracking of journalists, verified accounts, and other key voices
- Competitive & Comparative Benchmarking
•    Benchmark university against peers, athletic conference rivals, and aspirational institutions
•    Share-of-voice and sentiment comparisons
•    Configurable benchmarking groups
- Crisis & Reputation Management Tools
•    Alerts for spikes in volume or sudden sentiment shifts
•    Early detection of misinformation, controversy, or negative press
•    Monitoring for impersonation, brand misuse, or threats
- Platform Management and Organization
•    Customization of user roles and permissions
•    Ability to partition access to assets and workspaces
- Reporting & Visualization
•    Executive-ready dashboards with key performance metrics
•    Interactive visualizations for sentiment, topics, and engagement
•    Customizable reports for athletics, administration, communications, and other stakeholders
•    Live data dashboard capabilities preferred.

- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Non-Mandatory Pre-Proposal Date: October 30, 2025
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: October 31, 2025