12 Sep 7 Ways Marketers Can Leverage Topsy Pro
Twitter analytics: there are so many options out there – some of which I’ve critiqued in a previous article Staying Afloat in a Sea of Twitter Analytics. Discussion about Twitter analytics tools is popular, not least because Twitter itself has thus far refused to release its own free platform (they have a limited offering available only to advertisers). Given it’s one of the key platforms for businesses to communicate with their customers, there’s little wonder businesses are constantly on the lookout for the next “best” Twitter analytics tool.
One of the latest tools to hit the market is Topsy Pro Analytics, and after a quick review of its capabilities, it’s clear it’s one of the most comprehensive tools available. Topsy Pro is a paid platform, but you can sign up for a 30 day free trial. It’s still unclear what the standard rates are going to be, so at this point it’s difficult to comment on value for money.
Releasing a new paid Twitter analytics tool is ambitious given the competition that already exists in this arena. So, it stands to reason that it would have to have some serious features included. And I’m happy to say it doesn’t disappoint. There are features-a-plenty once you sign up and take it for a test drive.
Here are seven ways marketers could leverage the capabilities of Topsy Pro to help with their social, marketing, product and brand strategies:
1. Competitive Analysis
Topsy Pro lets you pull data for any topic, term, hashtag or username (so basically anything), which means you are not limited to a certain number of keywords or volume of mentions like other tools in the market like Radian6, for example. In addition to pulling data in relation to your own brand, products and campaigns, Topsy Pro also allows you to obtain the same data for your competitors. You can also directly compare the volume and sentiment in graphs like the one below. Pretty handy.
2. Campaign Tracking
Running a new campaign or event? What better to track it’s progress in real-time than with a social media monitoring tool? Even if your campaign isn’t social-based (e.g. TV or radio commercial, event, etc.), there’s a good chance people are going to use social media – in particular Twitter – to comment on it. Topsy Pro will feed you real-time results on what people are saying about your campaign and you can use these in your reporting and/or to influence your strategy moving forward. The screenshot below shows the Topsy Pro sentiment analysis (in terms of total sentiment score and the number of positive vs. negative tweets) on the term “Obama” – right up to the exact time I searched. You can also find most popular tweets about a given subject, who is talking about it, where it’s being talked about, related terms, the volume of tweets over time and the total exposure (in terms of eyeballs) for your search term over time. And that’s just a few of the possible analyses.
3. Regular Reporting
Topsy Pro is a also great tool to contribute to regular brand reporting. The sheer depth of analysis that is capable within the tool means you can easily pull key statistics, trends and insights out to include in regular reports – whether they be daily, weekly, monthly or otherwise. Whether you’re looking for simple graphs over time, most popular tweets, trending topics, sentiment analysis or just key volume metrics, Topsy Pro can deliver (but only in relation to tweets).
You can extract tweets based on keywords and sort them by relevance, date, influence, momentum, volume, acceleration and when they peaked – completely different from any other Twitter analytics platform’s capabilities that I’ve seen.
A search for the term “Adidas,” for example, lists all the top tweets, and when sorted via volume, we get the view below. You can see how many times a tweet was retweeted, how influential the tweet was, its momentum, acceleration and how many days since it peaked. If you click on the little arrow beside the metrics, it takes you to a new view that shows all retweets and a more detailed graph of tweet volume over time.
4. Analyze Historical Data
One of the cooler things about Topsy Pro is the fact you’re not limited to real-time tweets or the last month or even just one year. You can analyze data back as far as June 2010. Topsy Pro has indexed hundreds of billions of tweets (according to them), so you should be able to dig out some key insights and trends. Just like when you’re searching in real-time, you can drill down into the data in terms of location, language, sentiment, influence and more to see what has been changing over time. The depth of this sort of data could have a huge impact on your product/brand/marketing strategies if the volume of tweets is there for your brand term.
The screenshot below shows the seemingly vast increase in exposure for tweets about Adidas since June 2010.
5. Identify and Build Relationships with Key Influencers
One of the biggest advantages about social media that businesses should take advantage of is the ability to identify who is influencing perception about your brand. Topsy Pro makes that easy. First of all, you can choose to display “Influential Only” tweets by ticking a check box on the left panel. If you navigate to “Top Results,” you can filter the tweets by “influence” so that you only see the most influential tweets and the account they were tweeted from. And if you click on the tweet, it will navigate to the tweet within Twitter.
Key influencers is not a new feature in the realm of social media monitoring, but it’s a very important one to have and Topsy Pro takes it one step further by providing metrics around just how influential the tweet was, the momentum it gained and its acceleration (as I covered in the regular reporting point). Brands can then choose to contact these key influencers (if appropriate) to help shape and influence the conversation moving forward.
6. Uncover Potential Crises in Real-time
When I was on the social media team for Qantas, Twitter was often the platform where important news broke. For example, when there was an engine failure on one of the Qantas A380s in 2010, the Media and Operations team found out about it via Twitter before any other means (in fact Twitter reports indicated the plane had crashed, which was false).
While I wasn’t there for this particular incident, I can tell you that I often found out about important information via Twitter before management became aware of it through traditional means. This helped the company not only respond to the situation much quicker than in the past, but also influence the reaction and flow of information within Twitter itself (by getting involved in the conversation and clarifying facts straight away).
It also provides you with all the aforementioned options to analyze real-time conversations to get a comprehensive view of exactly what is being said. For example, see the graph for the term “Adidas” over an hour. Below this chart on the dashboard, you’re given a list of top tweets, top links and top media (e.g. videos, images, etc.) that you can delve deeper into if you wish.
What Topsy Pro seems to be missing at this point is an email alert service, where any spike in mentions (or sentiment change) prompts an email alert to be sent to you so that you can check out the situation. It’s also unclear at this point how often the platform will refresh your search if you stay logged in. It may not be the perfect platform for real-time monitoring, but it’s definitely capable of being such.
7. Analyze Trend Data to Help Make Informed Business Decisions
Reliable and relevant data (e.g. where your marketing budget will be going next quarter, whether you should release a new product or what your next campaign should look like) is always helpful when making difficult marketing decisions. Similarly, it can be very useful when presenting to senior management in order to get approval.
Topsy Pro adds another avenue to collecting data, particularly in relation to trends within your niche. When we look at the Social Network Analysis post, specifically at Pinterest search demand, we can find a correlation using Topsy PRO. Topsy tells us what people are actually talking about (albeit only on Twitter at this stage). By looking over historical data, you can assess the growing or declining interest in something over time (handy for competitive research and vertical analysis), crosscheck the data with different tools (i.e. Google insights, Alexa, Quantcast, etc.) and make a much more informed decision on how to proceed.
The screenshots below show the correlation between Twitter mentions of the word “Pinterest” and search interest (via Google Insights) for the phrase “Pinterest” over time, respectively. Having two data sets from two separate reliable sources showing the same trend helps demonstrate that Pinterest’s popularity peaked in February of this year.
Needed Improvements
Topsy Pro definitely has some useful features for marketers; however, there are a few areas where it could improve:
- Email alerts/reports as mentioned above.
- Include reporting-centric features that some other tools have like subject tagging, source tagging or notes.
- Add in-platform response functionality (you can’t reply to tweets within the tool) and the ability to assign tweets to people in a workflow process.
- Add the ability to change the sentiment of tweets (there’s currently no ability to determine what sentiment Topsy Pro has assigned to each tweet, which casts some doubt over just how accurate the sentiment analysis really is).
We also don’t know how much the standard fee is going to be once the trial period is over making it hard to form any conclusions in terms of value. However, what I can say is that in terms of a simple Twitter analytics tool, it’s one of the best I’ve seen.
