Following on from our post last week showing tools for comparing competitors' use of online marketing, Dan Barker recommended I take a look at Social Crawlytics, a tool for benchmarking social media that I hadn't seen. I've completed a quick review, so this alert gives some background on the tool and you can decide whether it's relevant for you.
Our review of Social Crawlytics
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Social Crawlytics
This is a free, simple tool that is aimed at showing you how popular your content based on how much it is shared across the main social networks as Likes, Tweets and +1s. It’s produced by Brighton-based SEO Yousaf of Elevate Local (@yesekand) and I think is a great effort given it doesn't have the backing many services have.
Although it’s free, it’s based on credits and I found myself out of credits after one report with no way to top them up without tweeting or waiting for next week - I guess that’s coming soon.
Unlike other tools which focus on a single social network like Twitter or Facebook, this one is great since it shows your total shares for:
So everything that matters really. Here’s an example:
It also gives a report on how individual pages have been shared across the networks:
The tool works by crawling your pages like a search spider and then calls the APIs the networks have to gain information on the number of shares. Bear in mind that the networks sometimes discard shares after a period (I believe Twitter does this after 6 or 9 months or so), so it is not all time shares, simply the most recent active shares.
For reviewing shares from your own site this tool doesn’t add so much since we now have Google’s Social Analytics. This shows the most popular networks for sharing and pages which are shared. However, for me the visualisation is much better than Google+. For example, it allows us to see how Twitter is more important and that Pinterest and Stumblepon shouldn’t be ignored.
What Google’s social analytics won’t do is to tell you sharing on your competitor sites, so this is the main benefit of Social Crawlytics - you can compare the level of sharing and review the most popular content types for your competitors as a way to learn about their content marketing.
Have you used this tool? What do you think? How do you use it?
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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