4 Social Monitoring Tools To Help The Modern Day Plate Spinner

by Graeme Benge on 11th September 2012

Plate spinning as a sport has not got the traction you would expect, which is surprising given the amount of it that goes on every day by millions of people the world over. In the age of web 2.0 (techy jargon for an internet that’s content is created by users in addition to webmasters), protecting your brand whilst staying up to date on industry developments, looking for the next golden relevant keyword AND being nice and charming to your audience in the name of engagement, is tricky.

There is however a tool for everything it seems, so life has been made somewhat easier in that respect. The following 4 tools go some way to creating peace in the world and the point of this post is to keep things manageable. A list of 50 tools is likely to take up time best spent on other endeavours.

Social Mention 

First up is Social Mention . This is a search term based tool offering insight into what is being said about you, your product or your brand that then presents a “single stream of information”. There are excellent possibilities with Social Mention in that from the dashboard you can understand engagement, keyword performance as well as identifying where to build a presence.

Key features

• Search by medium – blog/microblog/bookmarks/comments/images/image/video
• Sort by date or source, sort by time period
• Four metrics: strength, sentiment, passion and reach
  • Strength = the likelihood of the terms being discussed
  • Sentiment = the ratio of positive comments to negative comments
  • Passion describes the concentration of discussion and those involved e.g.: a topic being discussed a lot by a small group is likely to be considered more passionate than if a topic is discussed by a broader audience talking about it less. Lower mentions per person but wider audience.
  • Reach describes the influence the topic has i.e. the number if unique authors divided by total number of mentions
  • Social mention breaks down the top keywords and the users for the terms as well as the sources and if there are hash tags being used to index the topic
  • One recommendation would be to incorporate match types as it can take a while to find really useful stuff amongst the broad match results that are returned
  • Custom alerts were available but are currently having work done to them.
  • It’s free so can’t complain too much at all…

Update: Tad points out Topsy gives an even better aggregator experience. Let me know what you think.

Crowdbooster 

An analytics based service giving insightful tips about your Twitter or Facebook presence. Crowdbooster gives you the obvious reach based stats are there but also engagement insights that can help improve your usage through connecting with influencers and when to use your profiles.

The freemium service allows analysis of one Facebook and one Twitter account, but currently is open ended which is nice. You can upgrade to a 10 profile package for $39 or 30 profiles for $99.

Key features

• Targeted recommendations find the people you need to connect with. First you’ll learn from them and then through careful interaction be able to access their audience of likeminded individuals.
• Snapshot analysis of your posts, giving impression count and retweets.
• Scheduling prompts.  Your 3 most effective posting times are suggested and there is functionality to schedule tweets within Crowdbooster.
• Follower growth looks at the audience you’ve built, shows variances (follower increases or decreases) as well as letting you tailor a search period to analyse. You can drill down here to a daily level and look at followers, tweets, mentions and retweets.
• Twitter follower analysis starts when you sign up but tweet and mention data can go back up to 3,20

See also: Followerwonk, the recent acquisition by SEOmoz enables SEOmoz accounts to be linked to Followerwonk’s own social graph functionality. I’ve not explored this fully however the functionality looks to be straightforward and offers deep insight.

Twitter lists 

Having found 400 really key people to follow on Twitter you’ll find soon enough that you can’t read everything they post. One way to help filter out the noise and find the nuggets Twitter hide is to use lists. I really love using lists.

If I want to know what’s going on in the high octane world of Conversion Rate Optimisation, then I simply go to my CRO list and see what’s going down. On a serious note, I’ve found I’ve been able to learn a lot more by having the focus on a topic being executed for me and I feel like the quality of the articles I tweet has increased. A “list created” date cross referenced with Crowdbooster might give me stats to back that up, however, there isn’t one as far as I can see.

It’s a crime the limit is 20 lists, but it really does help if you’ve segregated who you follow by subject.

Off the back of this you can find content to share across social platforms, tailoring to their strengths (i.e. images for Pinterest) and demonstrate your participation in conversations isn’t always about you.

Pinerly

The chaps behind Pinerly have created an analytics dashboard of real value. If you want to get to the root of what Pinterest can offer, sign up for Pinerly’s free service and benefit from the following features:

Key features

• Analytics – like/repins by board
• Suggested – helps encourage you to use Pinterest for more than just your own evil ends
• Follow – suggested Pinners to follow by category

So for the modern day plate spinner, there are tools to help you make sure those plates keep spinning. I’d be interested to know what other tools get used and also if there is any extra functionality people have discovered in the above tools.

Plate Spinning photo credit

Social Mention photo credit

Crowdbooster photo credit

Twitterrific photo credit

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