This week we take a look at an interesting new tool aimed at helping Twitter and Facebook users to understand and improve the performance of their social profiles by digging into various metrics and providing recommendations. Launched last year in private beta and having opened its door to all a few months ago, the California-based start-up has been gaining considerable traction. Companies and brands such as the Los Angeles Times, JetBlue and Ben & Jerry’s (as well as the managers of Lil Wayne and Drake) use it.
Setting up the platform is really easy and took us less than five minutes: all you need to do is authorise Crowdbooster to connect with your Twitter and/or Facebook profiles, create a password, provide an email address, and verify it. Straight away the platform starts pulling your social activity data, putting together stats and providing recommendations (you might need to wait a few minutes for everything to be compiled). The dashboard splits the analytics between both networks, so you can narrow down your insights accordingly. On the recommendations side, it advises on which times are best for posting updates, which are the most popular domains to recommend links about, and identifies the most influential new followers.
Engagement charts are provided to show how each update performs, plotting them according to the number of impressions and re-tweets/Likes. Area charts illustrate how the number of followers and fans evolve. The data in both types of chart can be narrowed down to the dates of choice, therefore allowing acts to track the performance of specific campaigns, events etc. Crowdbooster also encourages users to link their accounts on bitly in order to improve the metrics by tapping into the URL-shortening service’s data.
Deeper audience information is provided via tables, which identify the most influential followers, top retweeters and top fans. “Use these insights to cultivate and maintain a brand community”, highlights Crowdbooster. Additional settings include changing the time zone (the platform tweaks the recommendations and analytics accordingly), as well as the option to receive weekly performance email updates.
The platform’s free tier allows for using one Twitter account and one Facebook page simultaneously, while the professional one ($39/month) takes that to a total of 10 accounts – between Twitter profiles and Facebook Pages. The professional tier ($99/month) increases this to a total of 30 accounts across both social networks. While paid-for users also get live chat and phone support, all the features remain the same.
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