While the last few years have brought us tons of new social networks-Google+, Foursquare, and most recently Pinterest-these next few years will surely bring tools to help us enhance our social media experiences. It can be tough to really analyze so many different social networks, and when you try and have a social media presence for both yourself as well as your company it can get extremely overwhelming. Many services such as TweekDeck and Buffer have worked to help ease the pain, but there is one tool that hasn't gotten quite the praise it deservers-SocialBro.
SocialBro is a tool that helps you to both manage and analyze your Twitter community. The service started around April 2011 and has just recently teamed up with Buffer to offer an even better experience for users. The site focuses solely on Twitter, but it does an excellent job of breaking down all the layers of the site. When I first saw all the features SocialBro had to offer, I couldn't believe just how much information Twitter can give you about your followers (and hopefully customers). Consider some of the features listed below and how they can benefit your business.
Getting Started with SocialBro Analytics
The first thing that a user would do is download SocialBro and synchronize it with his/her Twitter account. You can go here to download SocialBro. The best part: It's free. Once you have SocialBro ready to go, there are several features it has to offer. Below is a screenshot of the different tools you can utilize:
The site often uses the terms "followers" and "friends." The first term describes people that are following you; the second term refers to people that you are following. It doesn't matter whether or not there is a mutual follow. I think you will find that breaking it up into two categories instead of three is much easier when you have a SocialBro amount of information to work with.
Once you have the terminology down, it's time to start exploring!
SocialBro Features Designed to Enhance Your Twitter Experience
1. Information about your relationship with followers.
If you have a ton of followers, chances are it's tough to keep them all straight. Many of us spend a few minutes every once in a while going through and deleting Twitter followers who haven't offered much information or value. SocialBro took this idea and brought it to a whole new level. The tool allows you to segment your followers based on several categories: a). people you are following who aren't following you back; b). people who follow you who you don't follow back; c). inactive followers and inactive friends; d). famous friends and followers; e). influential friends and followers; f.) very active friends and followers. The screenshot below is just a small portion of these options:
You will notice that the tool is also giving me either a red "down" arrow, a green "up" arrow, or a blue "=" sign. This lets me know whether or not these categories of friends and followers are increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. This is great if you're a business owner because you can determine whether or not your efforts are working. If you have a lot of red arrows, chances are you're doing something wrong.
2. It will help you determine when the most opportune time is to tweet.
This is the first tool that will actually help users determine when they should be tweeting. You want the most people possible to read your tweets, but it's tough to know when people are using Twitter. SocialBro will pull the analytics for you based on an analysis it does with your specific followers. It will give you a chart that will help you break your followers activity down by hour, day of the week, potential exposure by hour, potential exposure by day of week, as well as when you can best "reach" your followers. All of these specifics can be showed pictorially through the tool, but the below screenshot is simply just the general view of when I should be tweeting:
You will notice that I can also configure these results with Buffer. This way, my Buffer schedule will be set to tweet at the time when most people who are following me are likely to see the message. For obvious reasons, this is great for businesses.
3. The tool offers real-time analytics about your community and allows you to send a tweet.
This is a great tool because it allows you to see how many people are active at any given moment. Although your Buffer will likely be doing the tweeting for you, you may have a time when you want to go back to the old fashioned way of things and tweet something. It's fun to see how many people are posting at any given moment, and even more fun to see it shown graphically.
The tool also lets you create and post a tweet. If Buffer was never for you and TweetDeck is getting old, you can try SocialBro. It works in the same way as all the other tweeting options, except it's right there next to real time analytics. Below is a screenshot of these analytics:
4. The tool has very advanced filter features that work great for research.
If your business wants to obtain some specific Twitter analytics, you can use the filter feature on SocialBro. You can filter your results by the number of followers, friends, influence, followers/friend ratio, account age, tweets per day, and time since last tweet.
So What Does This Mean for Your Business?
These are just a few of my favorite features offered from SocialBro. The tool offers other little insights such as the timezones of your followers, the language most used by your followers, and even a map of where you can find your followers.
I think the most notable thing about the tool is the idea that everything is visual. All analytics are shown pictorially, and your followers can be laid out with their pictures so that you know exactly who you are dealing with when you create a filter. This makes the site great for someone starting a business or just hoping to improve their Twitter promotion. To recap:
- The tool lets you see who is active and who is inactive in your community; thus helping you maintain a Twitter feed of quality users who will benefit from your content and vice versa.
- You get a clear picture of when the most people will see your tweets; therefore helping you get the most out of all your twitter messages.
- You will have the ability to see the change in your Twitter community in real-time. You will be able to see who is following you and un-following you, and what types of users are completing these actions. This will help your company determine if what you are doing via Twitter is successful.
Once again, SocialBro is free, only takes moments to setup, and is extremely easy to use and understand. Have you used SocialBro in the past? Did you find that it helped give you a better picture of your Twitter efforts?
Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to background checks. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including phone systems to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.