There's a lot of buzz surrounding yesterday's public beta release of the social media marketing measurement tool Crowdbooster. In fact, it's been mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Techcrunch, and many other websites. This tool allows users to monitor certain metrics from both Twitter and Facebook, and it offers posting recommendations while scheduling tweets and posts to go out on a predetermined schedule. At Kuno, we're always looking for great tools to use to help our efforts and our clients' campaigns. We were invited to test out the private beta and check out Crowdbooster prior to yesterday's release. Here's some initial thoughts. . .
Crowdbooster is a very promising software and has three different pricing options - free, business ($20/mo) and agency (custom price). Its developers are very passionate about social media marketing and truly wish to develop the best software on the market for social media marketers. The software boasts these features:
Crowdbooster provides very good and accurate reports on not just how many friends or followers an account has, but daily growth numbers and very understandable graphs which can be switch to a one week view, one month view, all time view, or a custom view. We found this reporting to be very good at identifying growth and reduction trends over time.
While the follower/friend trending data is good, the retweet and mention metrics seem to be way off. When examining the live tweet stream over the course of a week and juxtaposing the data with what is reported by Crowdbooster it is clear the software is flawed. Both retweets and mentions were in the single digits for the week according to Crowdbooster. However, the actual count showed hundreds of both.
This brings into question the software's ability to truly give "at-a-glance insights about each Facebook and Twitter post" if it can't accurately measure sharing and mentions. Crowdbooster itself says, "We do our best to count both new and old-style retweets (RTs and Vias)." Our clients don't want to hear we tried our best. They want accurate timely reporting.
Without knowing exactly how Crowdbooster's algorithm works it's hard to be sure whether or not the ugly mentioned above has an impact on the software's other features. The feature which identifies top followers and influencers seems to be untouched by this flaw. However, providing a list of highly followed and friended web "celebrities" and brands isn't very valuable. Sure, it's possible to target messages to them, but the likelihood of AddThis, TweetDeck or Guy Kawasaki advocating for our campaign is slim to none.
The other features, like recommending the best time of day to post, post impression statistics and identifying the most influential mentioner looks very promising indeed. However, it's easy to question the accuracy of the reporting because Crowdbooster mal reports on mentions and sharing.
To be sure, Crowdbooster has heard some of the above criticism before and they're probably hard at work fixing it now. We hope they do, because this piece of software has massive potential for social media marketers and inbound marketers alike. For help with your social media marketing feel free to watch our "3 Steps to Successful Social Media Marketing video."
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