Union Metrics Review: Three FREE social media measurement tools designed for marketers

In today’s fast-paced social environment, social media managers are searching for measurement tools to not only provide data from social media accounts, but to also assist in interpreting and understanding what the data mean for their social media strategy. Union Metrics  is a social media measurement tool designed to do just that by turning data into strategy through social marketing intelligence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

What is Union Metrics?

Union Metrics is a web-based analytic tool designed with marketers in mind. Union Metrics began back in 2009 as TweetReach.com. Recently TweetReach joined forces with TrendKite and InsightPool to form Union Metrics.

This review focuses on Union Metrics’ free measurement tools including Twitter Assistant, Twitter Snapshots, and Instagram Checkup. Each of these tools include algorithms from the paid subscription features to help improve social media marketing for free. A brief description of each tool is included in the image below. There are paid subscription options include Social Manager ($49/mo), Social Marketer ($99/mo), and Marketing Team ($199/mo). More information can be found at https://unionmetrics.com/pricing/.

Free Social Analytics Tools courtesy of Union Metrics (https://unionmetrics.com/)

How the free Union Metrics tools work

To access each of the three free tools, users will need to register for a Union Metrics account, then link a Twitter profile to both the Twitter Assistant and Twitter Snapshots tools and link an Instagram account to Instagram Checkup.

Twitter Assistant

Once you have linked a Twitter account all you have to do is run the Twitter Assistant tool. It will then provide a breakdown of information from the linked account over what seems to be a four-week time period. Information will include the top performing tweet, what tweet content needs improvement, best times to post, top performing hashtags, and your most influential contributors. Each section of information will explain what needs to be worked on with tips on how to improve, as seen in the image below.

Twitter Assistant report courtesy of Union Metrics (https://unionmetrics.com/)

Twitter Snapshots

After linking a Twitter account, you are able to search for any hashtags, keywords, or accounts. A snapshot will then be generated with information about the potential reach, potential impressions, recent activity, and contributors.

This feature is helpful to understand the potential reach of your account or even a recent social media campaign. In addition, you can even get a look at your competitors’ reach and impressions. This feature does limit you to only the latest 100 tweets or the past seven days, whichever comes first. So, keep that in mind when analyzing data over an extended time period of a campaign.

Twitter Snapshots report courtesy of Union Metrics (https://unionmetrics.com/)

Instagram Checkup

Running the Instagram Checkup will generate a report containing the frequency of posts, the best time to post, your top hashtag, as well as the posts with the most engagement. Tips for improving each section are provided as well. Only the posts from the last month will be included in the checkup report. Once running the report it can only be updated every 24 hours.

Instagram Checkup report courtesy of Union Metrics (https://unionmetrics.com/)

Pros and cons of Union Metrics’ free tools

Like all measurement tools, Union Metrics has some pros and cons that users should be aware of prior to using.

Pros

·         Free means free. Union Metrics never requires a credit card to use the free features, and there is no free trial time frame limit. 

·         Data insights. One of the outstanding pros for Union Metrics is that the tools provide data for marketers but also include tips and insights on how to use the data to improve a social marketing strategy. 

·         User friendly interface. Union Metrics’ website is easy to navigate and understand. All of the tools are easy to learn and do not require previous experience to use. Also, all terms are defined on the website.

·         Navigation. Switching between the three tools is easily done by the drop down menu on the web page.

·         Speed. Across all three tools, they operated very quickly. Generating reports only took a few seconds, but depending on the size of the data could take up to two minutes.

·         Instagram analytics. Instagram analytics are usually difficult to come by, and the fact that Union Metrics provides a free checkup tool is a great pro.

·         Privacy. Upon linking each account to the three tools, you are informed of every aspect of information the tools will be able to access. No outstanding privacy concerns stood out as the tools mostly required access to only basic account information.

·         Official Twitter partner. Union Metrics is an official Twitter data partner. They are credited in assisting users make informed decisions regarding Twitter data. For more information visit: https://partners.twitter.com/

Cons

·         Amount of data. As with many free versions, Union Metrics severely limits the amount of data allowed in the measurement reports. Twitter Snapshot only allows for the latest 100 tweets or the past seven days, whichever comes first. Twitter Assistant only analyzes tweets over the last four weeks, and Instagram Checkup only includes posts from the last month.

·         Brief insights. Because these tools are free, the insights are brief and at the surface level. For example, the tool might say “post more content like this” or “use a variety of content styles,” which is helpful but not necessarily very informative. To gain more in-depth insights, you will need a paid version. 

·         Limited number of accounts. Each tool only allows for one account to be linked. This can be a con for businesses with multiple accounts.

·         Ability to save/download reports. Except for Twitter Snapshots reports, in which you can easily download, print, share a link, and export to excel, Twitter Assistant and Instagram Checkup do not have the ability to download or export reports.

·         No Facebook analytics. Facebook is not included in the free version and could be a con for marketers trying to have all social platforms analyzed in one place.

Overall recommendation

Union Metrics’ free social media measurement tools are beneficial for marketers of small organizations and businesses. These tools are limited in their abilities so after the first use, they are best used as a monthly checkup or after a specific campaign. With no cost and no perceived risk, users cannot only receive data and analytics from their social media platforms but also information, tips and insights on how to put that data to use through their social strategy. To begin using these free Union Metrics tools visit https://unionmetrics.com/free-tools/.

Logan Allen is a graduate communication studies student at Tarleton State University. You can get in touch with him at @LoganSAllen on Twitter.

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The Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI) is a group of faculty, staff, and students at Tarleton State University with a mission of conducting social media research; sharing social media best practices; and providing social media education for students, non-profit organizations, state agencies, school districts, and higher education institutions.


Contact us:
Texas Social Media Research Institute
Follow Us on Twitter - @TSMRI
Call Us - 254-307-8211
Join Us for Our #TXSocialMedia Weekly Twitter Chats on Thursday Nights at 8pm CDT
texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com

Measurement Review: Tweepi

When it comes to Twitter, the foremost metric most people look at and care about is the amount of followers you have, which can be seen as how much influence your account has.  Many tools out there measure analytics about the followers and engagement you already have, but what about getting more followers and engaging a wider audience, as well as measuring the quality of your followers? Tweepi is a tool designed specifically for this purpose. Its goal is to target well-connected accounts or influencers within the Twitter network, help engage them and get them to follow you.  It can help manage the quality of accounts you follow and that follow you. Finding potential accounts to widen your Twitter followers is something that can be applicable whether it’s your business or just an individual wanting to grow a personal brand.

How it works
The process that Tweepi uses to help expand your followers works like this. Simply choose an account in your industry or a valuable influencer that you know of in the “follow friends” option on the Tweepi dashboard, or “follow followers” option, also on the dashboard. Here accounts following your chosen account are listed with relevant data. Instead of spending hours of your time looking at accounts manually they can be sorted en mass.  In the listings you can add multiple search criteria. Some valuable stats that I found include showing when an account most recently tweeted so you can weed out inactive accounts and follow ratio. The higher this ratio the more likely those accounts are to follow accounts that follow them.  The statistics can be listed in ascending or descending order to find the most or least active accounts for your given search criteria. You can also sort by data points like location, an option that could be very useful for a Twitter account based around a local business, or identifying friends of customers in your network who live in the geographic area.

Some other features offered by the Tweepi service have to do with making informed decisions about accounts you follow and accounts that follow you, allowing you to tailor where the engagement of your account is pointed. This is done in a very similar process to how you would find new potential followers. Simply pull up the list of your followers and set criteria for things like location, recently tweeted, amount of followers, etc. You can analyze a list of curated Twitter accounts from external databases as long as the account names are in a comma separated value file, something that Excel or other database programs should be able to export.  As far as I can tell from the documentation no explicit limitation was set for the number of accounts that could be imported for analysis. From the data available in this analysis you can weed out accounts that are either spam (perhaps bots) or maybe are no longer active.

Tweepi offers tools that could save time by causing accounts that have no bio or accounts that still have the default Twitter profile picture known as “the egg” to force unfollow your account, meaning that unwanted users will no longer see your tweets in their feed. Along with these batch unfollow options, can choose accounts individually and have them force unfollow you as well. This could be a useful tool if you have accounts following you that are toxic or abusive —just an extra step of protection beyond blocking them from your account.  If they are no longer seeing your tweets in their feed they might move on and forget you exist.

Unfortunately any of these follower management features are not available with a free account. A free account only allows you to use some of the find follower and account analysis features. The amount of results per list page is also limited to 20 or 40 if you're willing to tweet about the service.  If you decide to pay for the program that is increased to 100 at Tweepi’s silver level ($12.99 per month) or 200 results per page at the platinum level ($24.99 per month). Other features that are locked up behind the paid subscription are the ability to include Klout scores in the search results, the ability to search account bios for keywords and being able to see lists of users who recently tweeted a keyword or hashtag.

Other services provide Twitter account analysis like foller.me and followerwonk. Those services are free and often times go more in-depth into some of the statistics behind accounts, however those services offered results one account at a time and do not to give any of the following management options that Tweepi does.

As far as my experience goes with using the product it's pretty simple and straightforward.  The user interface is relatively intuitive and adding and editing search criteria is straightforward if you've ever used a search engine before.  From the company's about page this seems to be the only product and the team seems rather small so support might a concern. My assumption is if you had a problem or request you would be dealing directly with the developer. This product could be useful for a single individual looking to build his or her brand to a mid-sized company.  The limitations of the amount of rows available in search results page would begin to become too cumbersome if you're dealing with Twitter accounts that have 10,000 followers.

Larger companies might be looking for a product that would do analysis on sentiment or search engine optimization, which this product does not really touch at all.  It mainly focuses on the text, networks and some of the meta information around various accounts.  Performance-wise there could be some issues. Whenever you do an action it takes sometimes upwards to 15 seconds for the action to go through, which could be cumbersome if you are making changes in large batches.  It's also probably not a tool that you use every day, more likely it's something you would operate once-a-week or month identifying some new accounts to follow and removing unwanted accounts.

Overall I'd say this product is a relatively accessible way to target valuable accounts to engage with on the Twitter platform,  giving you a top- level analysis of desired accounts in a time-saving manner.  Perhaps more valuable than this feature is the ability to manage the accounts that follow you particularly if your account has a community or customer management aspect.  Being able to remove followers that are obviously fake cluttering up your ability to engage with actual customers or being able to remove accounts that are abusive or hostile,  helps to preserve  personal and corporate images.

If you're interested in trying Tweepi for yourself you can sign up for a free account at https://tweepi.com.

About the author
Justin Pack is a digital media enthusiast with a passion for the internet, gaming and video production. He is a graduate student at Tarleton State University pursuing a master's degree in communication.

About TSMRI
The Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI) is a group of faculty, staff, and students at Tarleton State University with a mission of conducting social media research; sharing social media best practices; and providing social media education for students, non-profit organizations, state agencies, school districts, and higher education institutions.

Contact us:
Texas Social Media Research Institute
Follow Us on Twitter - @TSMRI
Call Us - 254-307-8211
Join Us for Our #TXSocialMedia Weekly Twitter Chats on Thursday Nights at 8pm CDT
texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com

Measurement Review: Iconosquare

This is part of our series on social media measurement tools.

Discovering Iconosquare – a tool for your Instagram!

Iconosquare's logo.

Iconosquare is a measurement and analytics tool for your Instagram account. When this tool analyzes your account it does more than just a broad overview, it really gets into detail. Not only does it update every hour to keep you up to date, but it also exports and reports for you and tracks your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). You can track everything from hearts given to your engagement rate. These updates are delivered to you by email with your daily, weekly, and monthly numbers.

Iconosquare also helps you to really get to know your Instagram community by tracking your follower and following growth, your gained and lost followers, your top followers, and your most important lost and gained followers, as well as informing you of your relationships on Instagram (who follows you back and who you do not follow back). This awesome tool even tells you what states and countries your follows are located in, which may be of importance to growing businesses. If that wasn’t enough, the analyzing portion of this tool also breaks down your public and private following base.
Content and engagement  play a large role with this tool. Iconosquare allows you to visualize your post history and your posting habits.  They allow you to see how often you use hashtags and certain filters, your likes and comments history, filter impact, hashtag usage, hashtag growth and hashtag engagement, as well as the best time of day to post.

Screenshot from Iconosquare.

Iconosquare saves you time managing your Instagram account. This tool allows you to link more than one account and to create custom feeds for the needs of each account you are managing. Iconosquare provides you with an account manager and live support for whenever you need help or have questions.

There is a free seven day trail, and after that you can buy either monthly or yearly and can choose either plus, elite, or corporate.
Monthly: Plus ($4.90) Elite ($14.90) Corporate ($49.90)
Yearly: Plus ($28.80) Elite ($149.00) Corporate ($499.00)
Each allows different bonuses.

While Iconosquare is a great tool, it does have competitors. The top three competitors being Agorapulse, Social Studio, Simply Measured, and Schedugr.am. While Iconosquare offers a lot, these are close alternatives to the tool, offering a lot of similar features.

This tool is intended for businesses and companies trying to grow their social media or businesses and companies trying to reach their audiences and get their business or word out. Marketing departments can greatly benefit from Iconosquare but so could individuals who are trying to grow their following base or their name. Iconosquare is a great fit for any audience that would want to use it, simply because it offers everything that you could want for your Instagram account. For example, if I were looking to start a boutique, growing my personal following base would greatly benefit me in the future when I open my boutique.

Positives of this tool would be how it can break down just about any part of your Instagram – filters to where your followers are located. Negatives of this tool were that it took over an hour to analyze my account when I first uploaded it, and it has been known to record the wrong number of followers/following and limits the number of items that can be viewed. There has been no explanation why, but it has been fixed.

This tool runs everything from large to small databases, the more data that you have, the more that it is able to analyze for you. Don’t scare away if you have a couple of Instagram accounts, you can easily link each and receive data for each.

What’s in it for you?
This tool literally breaks down every part of your Instagram into charts, graphs, and easy-to-read data that will allow you to analyze any part of your account,. from figuring out your most popular filters and interactive hashtags!

Iconosquare is totally worth your time money, and digital space. This tool makes measurement and analytics of your Instagram so simple. Anything that you could or would want to figure out about your Instagram influence is all laid out for you in simple graphs and charts. Not only that, it’s easy to learn. I’m not the most tech savvy person and I picked it up rarely fast. After a week using the tool, I have not gotten bored with it yet. You are always posting and getting likes, and gaining new followers - just as that is exciting, this tool analyzing it, is as well.

If you are interested, this product's easy to find! Just visit Iconosquare.com.

About the Author
Emily Teaford is a graduate student at Tarleton State University where she focuses in Communication Studies. You can contact her at @etweetford on Twitter.
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The Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI) is a group of faculty, staff, and students at Tarleton State University with a mission of conducting social media research; sharing social media best practices; and providing social media education for students, non-profit organizations, state agencies, school districts, and higher education institutions.

Contact us:
Texas Social Media Research Institute
Follow Us on Twitter - @TSMRI
Call Us - 254-307-8211
Join Us for Our #TXSocialMedia Weekly Twitter Chats on Thursday Nights at 8pm CDT
texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com

Measurement Review: TalkWalker

This review is part of our series on measurement tools for social media analytics.

Social media has become the key to any organization’s marketing strategy, but how do you track the success? Social media listening, monitoring and analysis is the other side the coin and can take your efforts to the next level by providing information that can lead to data-based decision making.

TalkWalker is a component that you can  add to your marketing toolkit. This cutting-edge, web-based data monitoring company will keep you up-to-the-minute informed on your company’s or client’s latest social happenings. TalkWalker offers a way for you to listen, analyze, then report social media information through a highly customizable dashboard.

TalkWalker's home page.

TalkWalker was founded in Luxembourg in 2009 by a privately held company, Trendication. In February of 2015, a New York office was opened and Todd Grossman was named CEO. The launch of the North America office was a major step in development and assisted with the company moving forward while still striving to improve technology and service.

While competitors such as Nuvi and SproutSocial boast comparable systems, TalkWalker has a new visual listening feature that sets them apart from the rest. Visual listening is the ability to monitor, analyze or act upon visual content online and on social networks by combining image recognition technology with social intelligence.

http://blog.talkwalker.com/en/visual-listening-marketing-social-listening/

Visual listening is a game-changer as visual content dominates online and in social media. According to a white paper on TalkWalker.com, because visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text and can persuade consumers more easily, it is used in 66% of all social media posts. Text-only listening tells half of the social media story, by utilizing this technology you can now find images that include your logo, brand or visual elements pertaining to your business that you may have otherwise missed.  The visual listening feature along with traditional monitoring services and reporting positions TalkWalker as one of the world’s leaders in social media data intelligence.

TalkWalker pricing ranges anywhere from zero dollars for a free search to $3,000 per month based on your company’s needs, project capacity required, results needed and more. The pricing limits accessibility to the system for those of us with small marketing budgets.

Talkwalker screenshot.

TalkWalker seems to be predominately used by firms servicing clients instead of those looking for in-house analysis. Upon providing your email and contact details, anyone can obtain access to the free search with no credit card required.

The free search didn’t turn up any results for the small non-profit I entered, but results followed when I entered bigger brands such as Nike and Coke. Results of my search were easy to read, linked to the main media source and included metrics. However, the free search option does make a disclaimer that the TalkWalker free search is based on sample data and for full data access you can contact an associate and request a demo.

If you aren’t ready to shell out the big bucks for all the features, TalkWalker is a plethora of useful social media marketing information including case studies, white papers on the latest monitoring technology, how to guides and more.

If you are a firm or large agency that could use a boost to your social media monitoring tool belt, TalkWalker is a solid bet. You can participate in a custom, one-on-one demo of the software by visiting http://www.talkwalker.com/en/social-media-intelligence/.

About the Author
Skyla Claxton is a communication graduate student at Tarleton State University. You can contact her at @skylaclaxton on Twitter. 
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The Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI) is a group of faculty, staff, and students at Tarleton State University with a mission of conducting social media research; sharing social media best practices; and providing social media education for students, non-profit organizations, state agencies, school districts, and higher education institutions.

Contact us:
Texas Social Media Research Institute
Follow Us on Twitter - @TSMRI
Call Us - 254-307-8211
Join Us for Our #TXSocialMedia Weekly Twitter Chats on Thursday Nights at 8pm CDT
texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com

Twitter Analytics: Not Just For Business

Have you ever wondered how much reach you (or your business) has on Twitter?
One way to find out is by using Twitter's free analytics tool.
It will tell you which of your tweets have received the most interaction from your followers.

How to use Twitter Analytics
1. Sign into your account by going to http://analytics.twitter.com.

2. You will be taken to the campaigns page, which requires money for Twitter ads.
Instead, go to the top of the page and click Analytics.

3. Click on Timeline Activity. 
At the top of the page, you'll be shown your timeline activity for the last month, including mentions, follows, and unfollows.  Follows (people who have followed your Twitter account) are the blue lines above the x axis. Unfollows (people who have unfollowed your account) are the pink lines below the x axis.

In the gray area underneath the chart (see picture below), you will notice that the display of tweets defaults to ALL.  If a tweet has been clicked on, you'll see text that tells you how many clicks the tweet received. To the right of this, is the number of favorites, re-tweets, and replies to each tweet.

Screenshot of TSMRI's Twitter analytics.

4. To find out which of your tweets have been the most successful,  click on BEST instead of ALL.
This will show you the number of tweets that have been favorited, replied to and re-tweeted the most.
This is the type of content you want to duplicate on your Twitter feed, so take note.

5.  Learn more about your followers.  To get this information, click on Followers instead of Timeline Activity (step 3 above).  You will be taken to a page like the one below.

Screenshot of TSMRI Twitter Analytics information.

Some of the information included is how many followers you've gained over the past year, what their interests are, where they are located, their gender distribution, and what Twitter accounts they follow.
Sometimes the data will yield up surprises.  For example, you might guess that most of our followers would be interested in social media, but their number one interest is actually business and finance.
Use information about your followers to tailor your tweets to their needs.

Note: Twitter will require you to walk through the first few steps of setting up an ad campaign before you can access Analytics. Click on "Get Started" and on one of the campaign buttons. Since you have not given financial information out, you will not be charged. Keep following steps until you see the word "Analytics" at the top of your screen.

Questions about Twitter? Tweet us at @tsmri and we'll be happy to help.