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Would you pay for Twitter stats?
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There are an increasing number of sites that are charging for access to Twitter stats, using the typical freemium model, where you get a certain amount for free and then have to pay to get to the good stuff. But is there really any benefit in paying for a stand-alone Twitter analytics package, when there are some excellent social media monitoring services available, at a competitive rate, such as Viralheat? Firstly, why might you want to pay for one of these services?
The Pros
Firstly, why would you want to pay for advanced Twitter stats, when you can get so much from the free tools available? The advanced search options on Twitter Search provide you with a wealth of ways to find out what’s being said about your company, service or brand. The only drawback is the limited period through which you can search for tweets, currently set to 7 days.
Trendistic is a very nice tool that allows you to drill down into the associated tweets for a given day. The one negative of this site is that if you have a fairly niche term, it isn’t able to track for this.
The other benefit to paying for a Twitter analytics package, is that they can help you make sense of the numbers, through looking at the reach and influence of a tweet/tweeter.
The Cons
Price would be the obvious one here – why pay for something when you can get a fairly good service for free? But as you’ll see from the package outlined below, the prices aren’t sky high and could end up saving you money, and helping you gain a lot more insight into your Twitter activity.
Information overload. The drawback of paying for a dedicated Twitter package is that you get so much information that in the end makes little sense to you (or your client). It’s very tempting to get drawn into metrics that don’t really transfer into real world measurables, and you might end up wasting your time trying to improve a metric that isn’t going to give you any real value back.
Tweetmeme Analytics
There’s a handy video below from Tweetmeme that will give you an overview of how their service works, and there’s certainly some nice features. The site shows you how your web content is spreading through Twitter, as opposed to searching for a particular term or Twitter link. You get some pretty graphs that show you how a particular tweet has been trending, when it peaked etc.. But what I particularly like is the feature that shows you the visibility of users – so how many people saw your tweet, but also the most influential retweeters. This is something that’s incredibly valuable for a brand and is certainly not a job you want to be doing by hand.
You can’t doubt the depth of statistics you get, and I recommend you register for a free trial, but again I’d say don’t get bogged down in the detail. Looking at the source of tweets/retweets such as web, tweetdeck etc.. won’t really tell you an awful lot in terms of ‘real world’ information. Prices are from $50 per domain per month, which is certainly affordable.
There is clearly a future and money to be made in analytics, as Twitter have just bought analytics startup Smallthought Systems. The important thing when measuring Twitter (or any social platform) is not just to get drawn into the numbers, but make sense of them and ensure you’re tracking over time to see how you’re improving.
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I don’t know about the other services, but I do subscribe to Viralheat and I’ve found that it is much more convenient and comprehensive than attempting to roll my own with Twitter search. And Viralheat also monitors Facebook, YouTube and other video sites and the general web.
Hi Ed – Viralheat definitely seems to be a popular choice at the moment, and it’s encouraging that it’s so well received given that it’s at the lower price point compared to Radian 6 etc..
I think the free tools do the job nicely for the small business, the paid tools are really seem more for the true engager aka social crm-big business-rad-6-social media policy etc. Measurement in terms of twitter and the social graph does seem non standardised, it would be nice to see an industry standard for measurement of influence/engagement instead of fragmented proprietary measurements that are deemed important by the builder. Also 7 days archiving search on twitter is just so wrong- a company with tens of millions invested can’t deliver this is just unfunny.
The free tools definitely offer you a lot, the only downside is that it’s much more time consuming, having to go to separate sites (Twitter search, blog search engine, Facebook) to get your stats. And time is generally something that small businesses don’t have.
You’ve hit the nail on the head when you talk about standardisation. I think this is something that the industry is moving closer to. The issue is that the numbers are so open to interpretation and there can be conflicting arguments over what’s important. I.e. does number of retweets matter, or how many followers each retweeter had, for example.
And completely with you on the 7 days, not sure why this hasn’t changed yet! It may well be something that’s offered down the line, and maybe at a price given their new acquisition of Smallthought.
As with Joes point, I think the free tools do the job for a small business. However, they are all fragmented so there is a little bit of pain in finding the right tools and then trying to get them to “fit” to your businesses needs. If you are a bigger business you may have the luxury of paying for professional software.
I also saw that Smallthought was acquired by Twitter and the same thing jumped into my head “analytics for Twitter”.
See here for the blog post I have written on it : http://socialbits.net/blog/dabbledb-has-been-bought-by-twitter/
With Facebook, you get Facebook insights, you have Google analytics for your site or blog, you have insights for Youtube also.
Is it expected that Twitter should provide some sort of analytics for free also?
Or will Twitter charge for it?
If they do charge for it, what features will you get for your money?
Just the last point to throw in, one of Twitter’s features is that it is suppose to deliver breaking news, any time there is big news it can’t handle the news, you get “Fail Whale”. For instance it has been up and down since the start of the world cup.
If they try and layer analytics software into their existing architecture then will it crash more often?
And if it crashes more often are you willing to pay for it?
Hi Mark, given Twitter’s monetisation problems, it might be something that they offer for free, butt as you mentioned Google analytics and Facebook insights – these are both offered for free so it might be a strange move for them to make. Obviously these 2 services have revenue models in their ad system, so there’s no need for them to incentivise a subscription fee.
You’d just have to hope that they fix their downtime issues soon!
Hi Mark, given Twitter’s monetisation problems, it might be something that they offer for free, butt as you mentioned Google analytics and Facebook insights – these are both offered for free so it might be a strange move for them to make. Obviously these 2 services have revenue models in their ad system, so there’s no need for them to incentivise a subscription fee.
You’d just have to hope that they fix their downtime issues soon!
As a Twitter developer who attended Chirp, perhaps I can shed some light on this:
1. Everything I saw at Chirp and everything I’ve seen since tells me that Twitter is on a course to *clearly* differentiate itself from both Facebook and Google. They can’t hope to compete head-on with either of them.
2. I haven’t seen any indication that Twitter will give away analytics in the same sense that Google does. Twitter’s business model appears to be to *sell* advertising and analytics to partners like Starbucks, DisneyPixar and Coca-Cola. They have other partnerships with media companies – Oxygen, MSNBC, the New York Times and MSNBC.
3. Twitter has begun regulating the API call rate to attempt to alleviate the load caused by the World Cup traffic. My prediction is that once the World Cup is over, that regulation will remain in place. Moreover, once the oAuth capabilities are in place, I’m guessing that Twitter will *sell* higher API call rates than are “publicly” available. Almost since day one, they’ve offered “whitelisting” on a case-by-case basis but not charged for it to my knowledge. I think that’s going to go away.
Twitter struggled with scaling initially then rewrote their system but again an issue. Ok they deal with millions of tweets everyday but still this can’t be good for kudos points with celebs + audience maybe tweeting about mr fail whale. Fred Wilson did state third party services were at risk aka(seesmic plus others)so services that currently offer analytics at the moment could be in for a rough ride. I think deffo your right on that front Mark Cohill hopefully Smallthought does become the new analytics for twitter, I hope free . Lol totally agree on the breaking news, you know when there is a major world event or when the bieber fans go crazy the fail whale appears.
Because Twitter is so clearly lacking in analytics to help their users understand how well they are tweeting, there are many companies in this game. Part of the problem of Twitter is also that it is part earned media and part paid media, so it is difficult to say what the right measurements are (impressions? engagement? what is engagement? what about CPC and CPA?).
I think the currently available analytics services are doing an okay job because people were confused and these services help clarify what is going on. What’s lacking in these services is taking it a step further. Now what do these numbers mean, and how can users improve? This touches on what is the ROI that users are looking for from Twitter. Do you have another post that talks about that?
“Because Twitter is so clearly lacking in analytics to help their users understand how well they are tweeting, there are many companies in this game.” Well, in terms of “understanding how well you are tweeting”, to my knowledge there’s really only one tool that specifically is designed to do that – Twitalyzer. The other tools are mostly broader in scope – they don’t deal specifically with Twitter.
Hey Ed,
Awesome response! Do you think Twitalyzer gives you enough actionable metrics for you to act on? It seems very comprehensive with many different kinds of measures, however, it doesn’t really give you an easy way of understanding what are the most important measures and how you can improve those measurements. I get confused just looking at the amount of stats that the service spits out. How do you use Twitalyzer? What are your goals on Twitter and how Twitalyzer help you get there?
I can come up with a few more like Twitalyzer off the top: ad.ly/analytics , tweetreach, twitteranalyzer, tweetstats.
I haven’t looked at any of the others recently. Twitalyzer is indeed “metric rich”, but they’ve got a pretty good user guide at
http://www.twitalyzer.com/definitions/Twitalyzer-Handbook.pdf
That used to be more prominently featured on their web site than it is now. But the key metric is impact – it’s an overall assessment of how well you’re doing. It’s the magical “one number” for those who must have one number.
Right now it’s saying my impact score is 7.3 percent. That might sound low, but below that it say that value is in the 92.8th percentile. What that means is that only 7.2 percent of the Twitter users in their sample have more impact than I do. The overarching goal would be to increase that value.
My goal for the past year has mostly been building a follower base. Twitalyzer helps me characterize my followers and decide which new followers I should follow back. Although there’s a lot of debate about this, *both* quantity and quality of followers are important. It *is* a numbers game – the more followers you have, the more conversations and retweets you will get, all other things being equal.
Twitter is a complex multi-dimensional network. In addition to the constantly-changing social graph, there are patterns in physical space and time. The last time I looked this morning, on a relatively slow Saturday morning Pacific Daylight Time, Twitter was collecting about 500 – 700 tweets per second. It’s much higher at certain times – I think the record during the World Cup was about 4,000 when the final match ended.
Ed,
Thanks for writing an extensive response about how you use Twitalyzer. I found it very helpful.
I have a hard time knowing where in Twitalyzer to go to look at my new followers and decide who to follow back. Do you know where? Overall, I don’t think enough of my friends have signed into Twitalyzer to give me significant analysis of my network.
So it’s interesting to me that having one number is important to you, and it sounds like “impact” is it. What do you think about seeing the components of “impact” instead of a score, for example, the percentage or number of people who retweet you, mention you, and follow you. We’re working on a way to do this and also show this on a tweet-by-tweet level, so you know which one of your tweets performed the best and then you can learn from there what makes a tweet that resonates with your followers. What do you think about that?
“I have a hard time knowing where in Twitalyzer to go to look at my new followers and decide who to follow back. Do you know where?”
I mostly look at the score – just paste the Twitter name in the box from the email and let Twitalyzer run. I obviously can’t do that with all my current followers – that would be possible with a screen-scraping script but it’s not worth the effort. Essentially I just unfollow existing followers if they get annoying.
“Overall, I don’t think enough of my friends have signed into Twitalyzer to give me significant analysis of my network.”
If you go into Twitalyzer and look at the control panel, you can actually see your “active” network. Generally, if you run into someone Twitalyzer hasn’t analyzed it a while, it will give you the option to update their score.
“So it’s interesting to me that having one number is important to you, and it sounds like “impact” is it.”
Actually, I’m far from a “one-number” person myself – I’m a mathematician and model builder. I like models and equations – ways to make predictions.
“What do you think about seeing the components of “impact” instead of a score, for example, the percentage or number of people who retweet you, mention you, and follow you.”
Twitalyzer can do this – in the earlier versions it was one of the default reports but they’ve added a lot of functionality since then. You can still do that if you want. Just go to the “Recommendations” page.
“We’re working on a way to do this and also show this on a tweet-by-tweet level, so you know which one of your tweets performed the best and then you can learn from there what makes a tweet that resonates with your followers. What do you think about that?”
It seems easy enough to do in theory, but I’m not sure how it would work in practice. I’ve been on Twitter a long time – I joined in early 2007, But I only really became active towards the end of 2008 and am primarily a Portland-area Twitter “persona” rather than someone attempting to build a “national” presence.
What’s the name of your tool?
Thanks Ed. I still can’t find some of the options. Maybe…I need to pay?
We’re at http://converse.ly/
I’ll shoot you a DM. I’d love to hear some more of your thoughts about this. Thanks again!