A New Generation Marketer

About a month ago I began the long search of finding the ‘perfect’ social media metrics tool to measure some of my work at Backupify. I utilized many channels to help me in my search. I posted on LinkedIn groups asking for recommendations, I tweeted several times for suggestions, and consulted my co-workers.

This process took much longer than I expected, but I finally found the tool that fits exactly what I was looking for.

To me, a great social media metrics tool needs to have the following criteria:

a. A dashboard outlining the most important statistics (preferably, this should be customizable)

b. Analysis of several social media channels (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.)

c. Ability to write into Google Analytics

d. Web monitoring so I know what is being said about the brand all over the web

e. Ease of navigation. I don’t want to spend an hour trying to generate one report or finding one set of information.

To note, I wasn’t looking at the big guys like Radian6 and Awareness Inc., and I also knew that search.twitter.com and Google Alerts simply were not enough for me. I decided to set my sights on the little guys doing big things (I tend to support them as the company I work for – Backupify – is such).

Here are the pro’s and con’s of the services I tested out:

HootSuite Pro

hootsuite.com/pro

I’ve been using HootSuite for over a year now and find it great to schedule and manage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates. However, I was not able to gain any metrics from my messaging unless I upgraded to a Pro account. A few months ago I received an email from HootSuite offering a week-long free trial of Pro. I tried it out but was not too impressed with what it gave me.

Pros:

• Great for managing mentions
• Easy way to schedule tweets
• One platform to go to for message sharing which is a huge time-saver

Cons:

• I found it hard to manage re-tweets
• Analytics were definitley sub-par
• I wasn’t able to measure much more than overall activity. I could not drill down into any other types of data (i.e. keywords, mentions per day, etc.)

ViralHeat

I was introduced to this tool over a LinkedIn discussion. While it did have its benefits, overall I found it to be very buggy.

Pros:

• I liked the email alerts it gave me
• Good custom reports
• Showed me trends from week to week of activity on social media
• Easy distinction between Twitter and Facebook performance

Cons:

• Mentions were not accurate whatsoever. If I was trying to manage the term “Backupify” on the social web, it would show me a ‘relevant’ tweet related to something like “doctors in Botswana”…
• Interface was subpar – it took me awhile to figure it out
• Overall it provided me inaccurate information which made me not trust it. Most of the information it gathered for me made me scratch my head wondering how they even pulled in that data and found it relevant to my search criteria.
• My tipping point was when I deemed this tool as insufficient for what I was looking for and it became IMPOSSIBLE for me to unsubscribe. There was no unsubscribe button. I had to search around to even find a support email and when I emailed them to politely unsubscribe me, I received no response whatsoever. To this day I am still registered even though I don’t use it.

Actionly

actionly.com

While Actionly did have some good benefits, I don’t think they’re quite there yet in terms of providing what I was looking for.

Pros:

• Allowed me to compare social web buzz of Backupify in relation to competitors and other terms which was great
• Showed trends of increased/decreased followers, mentions, etc.

Cons:

• The generated reports were not actionable whatsoever, even if I tried to tweak them manually
• They did not have Google Analytics integration at the time (I believe they will be soon)
• No good dashboard view

Argyle Social

argylesocial.com

I still use Argyle Social today (and have been for about four months) but not to the capacity that I need. This along with my chosen metrics tool provide me what I need.

Pros:

• Great social sharing capabilities right from a web browser
• Shows general trend of clicks via social media on the dashboard
• The founders and developers keep me in the loop with all future developments and even made a point to contact me directly to gain my feedback on their app which I really appreciated
• Allows me to breakdown clicks based on different social campaigns I have set up
• Shows share of clicks by social medium

Cons:

• I wish the dashboard showed me stats such as: most clicked posts, top keywords, top influencers, etc. Instead, I have to dig in manually to find out what is working and what is not
• They do not yet have integration with Google Analytics

And the winner is…

Raven Tools!

Why I Chose Raven Tools:

raven-seo-tools.com

Raven Tools provides me with everything and more I was looking for:

• Comprehensive, actionable dashboard
• Keyword analysis
• Competitive monitoring
• Integration with Google Analytics
• Inbound link manager
• Analysis of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
• Customizable reports
• Oh, and did I mention that they offer a 30 day free trial? I have yet to pay this service for all this awesome stuff! I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually looking forward to being able to pay them for all they do for me!

Cons:

NONE! I honestly have not found one drawback of Raven.

As you can see, it’s been a long road to find the right tool, but sometimes when you know what you want and need, it takes a little longer to get there. I want to give a big thanks to all the people on LinkedIn that helped me learn about these tools and for those that ultimately recommended Raven to me.

Currently, I’m using a combination of Raven Tools, Argyle Social and Google Analytics (although Raven integrates with this, I can dig into more data on Analytics itself) to measure social activity, and therefore how I’m performing at my job. If I want to perform well, my metrics tool must as well.

Have you tried out any of these tools? Do you use Raven Tools? Are there different requirements you have for a social media metrics tool? Let me know in the comments section below.

Note: I am not affiliated with any of these tools in any way nor was I paid to promote or demote any of them. This is solely my opinion based on extensive trials and testing.