CorpTweets

ThruSocial is a tool to create Facebook pages. It helps you create customised Facebook pages with no coding required. You can also use widgets such as PayPal and Videos while designing the pages. It has a Drag & Drop page designer which boasts of 48 different widgets.

With Thrusocial, you can add customised logos and color schemes, surveys etc, and publishing on Facebook is as simple as a click of a button.

In addition to Page creation, ThruSocial gives its customers a fantastic tool to help manage and schedule Wall posts. This is a great way to engage the audience situated in different time zones. ThruSocial also allows for integration with Twitter & Google Maps.

Some other features include direct communication with the customers through the Message Centre and a product called “thrupons” that lets you create custom deals. Using thrupons, Page Admins can offer their own pre-paid coupons of custom deals without using Facebook Deals or Groupon.

Using thruSocial, businesses can automatically create promotion campaigns with landing pages that live on Thrupons.com which are then automatically promoted in updates published by the app to the business’ Facebook Page and Twitter account. This is especially useful for small businesses that don’t want to continually promote their deals manually.

Pricing:

• FREE Basic trial version that allows one custom tab with 3 Pro widgets.
• Pro version for $19.99/month or $199 / yr; this version gives unlimited tab creation with unlimited Pro widgets, create & manage fan messages.
• Premier version for $34.99 / month or $349 / yr; this includes all the Pro offering + Premier widgets, PayPal, Polling, Flash, Custom HTML & FB comments.
• Enterprise version for $1100/yr; includes all the Premier offering + Professional Design Consultation

SoDash is a brand new social media brand management, lead generation, and customer service tool for Twitter and Facebook. Support for more social networks and blogs is coming soon. The company behind SoDash is The Sandpit, a UK based company that develops social media products.

The reason SoDash is unique owes to its artificial intelligence algorithms that learn what is important to your business through tagging. Once trained, it will automatically tag messages that are sales leads, positive or negative comments about your brand or competitors brands, deliver market information, ghost write and send responses and much more.

Here are the main features that differentiate SoDash from its competitors, which – according to them – are Radian6 and CoTweet:

• Sodash SmartSearch: Sodash SmartSearches run on a 24/7 basis, archiving results from the moment you set up the search. Sodash also filters out spam messages and translates foreign language tweets into English.  You can filter stored search results based on keywords, relationships, or time periods.

• Sodash SmartTagging: Sodash uses unique, patented algorithmic technology to cut through the clutter and pick out the messages that matter to you within returns from your search terms. Is it support, criticism, or a question? Does it warrant a response? Tag up a few messages and pretty soon Sodash SmartTagging will learn how to sort tweets for you.

• Sodash Ghostwriter: Tags can also be used to streamline engagement. Every tag can be assigned a ghostwritten draft response, making it easy to respond to people. You can review and send draft messages with a single click, but also retain complete flexibility to personalise the message.

• Sodash Analysis and Reporting: These include tools for charting and reporting help you find trends, track important topics, and measure the impact of your campaigns. You can chart volumes and common words. Zoom in to segments and individual tweets. Create RSS feeds and export to spreadsheets. Sodash also provides a weekly email digest, showing key information and a summary of the sentiment surrounding each of your searches.

Another feature I find very interesting is the Unified Inbox, where you can see your Facebook comments, Twitter mentions and direct messages in a single stream with conversational threads, conversational histories, and easy to use reply tools.

I couldn’t find any information about pricing on their website but I got in touch with them and here’s what they told me: The Sandpit offers SoDash under a variety of pricing packages, and pricing for agencies follows a license model:

• 1-3 users: from a minimum of 1,000 GBP /month (entry level: 20 searches) to a maximum of 2,000 GBP /month (60 searches)
• 4-10 users: from 2,000 GBP /month (entry level: 20 searches) to 3,000 GBP /month (60 searches)
• 11-20 users: from 3,000 GBP /month (entry level: 20 searches) to 4,000 GBP /month (60 searches)
• 21+ users: POA

As I mentioned, according to them “SoDash is far more advanced version of things like Radian6 and CoTweet – and also much better value!” although Radian6 is obviously much more complex and offers a lot more features. But SoDash sounds promising so we’ll keep an eye on it!

BackTweets is a Twitter analytics tool to help you understand how people interact with you and your content. Backtweets is powered by BackType, a marketing intelligence company that develops products and services that help companies understand their social impact.

The BackTweets dashboard offers a macro and micro view of Twitter activity. It includes data on tweets, mentions, retweets, replies, impressions, reach and followers. It even suggests the best time to tweet to generate replies or retweets. The tool includes search and advanced search features for keyword performance analysis.

Some of its most interesting features and capabilities include:

* Account Analytics: Graph your updates, impressions and reach, profile your followers, and more.
* Reach & Impressions Stats: Reach is the maximum number of unique people that saw a link or tweet. Impressions is the maximum number of times a link or tweet was seen.
* Influencer Profiles: Measure a user’s influence, who they influence and who influences them. They calculate an influence score from 1-100 using a proprietary algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank to indicate how influential a Twitter user is. The score is based on an examination of a user’s interactions and reach.
* Keyword Analytics: Measure the number of tweets, impressions and reach of keywords on Twitter
* URL Analytics: Measure the number of tweets, impressions and reach, and how they convert to traffic
* E-mail Alerts: Receive an e-mail notification whenever someone tweets a link to your website.
* Google Analytics Integration: They allow you to connect your Google Analytics account to BackTweets, so you can see how tweets, impressions and reach translate to visitors to your web site.

What I think is interesting about BackTweet is that data includes every tweet published in the past year and every link shared on Twitter during the past two years. Altogether, that amounts to data on more than 30 billion tweets.

They have a basic account which is free, as well as a single user (Pro) account for $100/month, and an Enterprise account (for up to 10 users) for $500/month.

We’ve previously reviewed TweetReach, which is also a tool to measure how far your tweets travel (=reach) but, as the founders claim, “BackTweets is the only product that closes the loop for marketing on Twitter, helping brands, understand how engagement on Twitter converts to web traffic, sales or other key performance indicators they’re interested in.”

Sprout Social allows businesses to efficiently and effectively manage and grow their social presence across channels and turn social connections into loyal customers. The web application integrates with Twitter, Facebook Pages, Yelp, LinkedIn, and FourSquare.  In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, lead generation, analytics and more.

Some key features:

• Clean and simple Dashboard.  You have a dashboard that lets you quickly view new followers, click-through from tweets, follower demographics, and your engagement and influence scores.
• Sprout Social can help you get more Twitter followers that are relevant to your business by searching users using key words and locations.  You can also get detailed information on your followers, influencers, engagement levels, clicks and more.
• Sprout Social lets you track the impact of your social media messages for rapid feedback and guidance on your social media strategy and future campaigns.
• Sprout Social will sort through the clutter and noise and deliver you the relevant content surrounding your brand. This will help companies to monitor conversations in chronological timeline.
• Sprout Social allows you to take your social contacts and create an entire profile on them, including their company, position, email address and phone number. Each profile also includes links to their social media profiles and the ability to send them a message.
• Sprout Social will automatically track your conversation history with every user and allow you to add notes to their profile. This gives you full customer relationship management capabilities with every one of your social contacts and saves you time not having to update contacts in multiple places.

Here is a snapshot of my Sprout Social dashboard.

Overall, I found Sprout Social to be very useful and interesting.  I can see how this would be a very good tool for companies looking to grow their presence with the right people online.

Pricing: An enterprise account is $49/month
You can sign up here: www.sproutsocial.com

Retweet Rank is a simple influence measurement tool for Twitter. It is based on the assumption that ReTweets are the best indicator of a user’s topical influence and his/her audience’s interest in the topic – thus it ranks Twitter users based mainly on the number of ReTweets they get.

Retweet Rank looks up all recent ReTweets, number of followers, friends and lists of a user. It then compares these numbers with those of other users and assigns a rank. For instance, if you get a Retweet Rank of 4,500 it means you are the 4,500th most influential person on Twitter.

Retweet Rank calculates the Retweet Rank and also displays your percentile. The percentile, which ranges from 0-100, indicates how you score relative to other users. It is calculated as follows:

Percentile = (Total Users on Retweet Rank – User rank) * 100 /Total Users on Retweet Rank

Retweet Rank tracks both RTs posted using the Retweet button and other RTs (e.g. “RT @username) but in order for you to get a Rank that’s a combination of both RTs you’ll have to sign in with Twitter from the Retweet Rank website.

Retweet Rank also publishes a Leaderboard of the most influential people on Twitter. These are the top ranked Twitter users, who have been most ReTweeted recently.

Retweet Rank was developed by Saurabh Sahni in December 2008 and as of March 2011, Retweet Ranks of 3.5M users have been looked up.

This tool is very easy to use and it’s interesting how they consider ReTweets to be the main indicator of someone’s influence. By looking at who’s been ReTweeting you the most you can, for instance, see who are the users worth building a relationship with. And by looking at what of your Tweets have been ReTweeted the most you can understand which topics interest your followers the most.

It is also worth comparing Retweet Rank to other tools that use a different approach to measuring influence on Twitter, such as Klout and PeerIndex.

Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.

Its main features are:

• The result is a visualization of what is popular and what is not among Twitter users, and how certain events are reflected or even predicted by the micro blogosphere.
• You can enter a phrase (topic) in the Trendistic search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate.
• You can divide the information into weekly, monthly, and also in the past 24 hrs.
• The weekly chart shows you the frequency variations of the different topics over the past seven days, using one-hour intervals
• On the right side of the screen, you can see a list of current trending topics and also the time of activity.



Trendistic is a free to use tool powered by Index Tank technology.  I tried it for the cricket results and got a decent look of how it is trending on Twitter. It is very easy to use.

Dialogix is an Australian social media monitoring tool that shows you what is being said about your brand, industry and competitors in Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites, forums, and much more. Dialogix, the tool, has been around since 2008. It was originally developed by e-CBD, a digital agency which has been operating in Australia since 1997.

Main features include:

• Monitoring: Dialogix monitors the entire social media spectrum, as well as most newspaper, TV and news websites in the world, with a particular focus on Australian, NZ and UK websites.
• Moderation: Dialogix has a team of Australian moderators based in Brisbane who cross-check the data before it gets to you, meaning what you see is 100% relevant to your business.
• Sentiment analysis: Several tools claim to determine the sentiment of what’s being said about your brand but Dialogix claims to be the only tool that uses trained human anaylsts to intelligently get their head around the real meaning of a conversation.
• Influencer profiling: Dialogix allows you to create an online database of key influencers and rank their social authority so you can see how many fans, hecklers and crowd-members your brand has. You can find people by country, state and even suburb and then sort them according to who has the most social influence and who mentions your brand the most.
• Alerting and reporting.

For information on pricing, you can visit their website. They have solutions for small businesses and big corporations and packages are fully-customisable too. Unlike other tools, there are no limits on data for any of their plans and no limits to the amount of users who can access the system.

The interface looks roughly like this:

If you are interested in trying Dialogix you can sign up and get a free five day trial. Unfortunately trials are only available to companies in Australia and New Zealand at this stage so I wasn’t able to sign up for a trial. I would have been very interested in checking out their sentiment analysis. I’ve always been disappointed with the automated sentiment analysis offered by most tools so I was curious to see how theirs is. I wasn’t even able to find any reviews of their tool but they claim to be the #1 social media monitoring tool in Australia and they are currently working with some big clients including Parmalat and Nivea so they must provide a good tool.

They definitely stand out for having human moderators and for also offering the ability to measure offline media, including newspapers and TV.

Twitterfall specializes in real-time tweet searches with an easy-to-use, powerful interface.  Users can search trending topics on the Twitterfall homepage and the results are delivered to your dashboard in a “waterfall” type feed that continuously updates with real-time tweets.  Their service is very simple and easy to use. Once you enter their site, you are prompted with instructions and can begin immediately.

The Twitterfall dashboard lets you customize your experience with a plethora of features.  On the right hand side of the page you can adjust your settings like the speed of your feed,  your preferred language, the option to show retweets, as well as the size of the text.  On the left side of your dashboard you have a Twitter search function, as well as the ability to add twitter lists, and more.  Another neat feature is the “exclusion” tab which lets you filter words that you are not interested in.  And finally geolocation, which lets you search by location.

To test out the service, I searched “Charlie Sheen.”  Almost immediately tweets started streaming down my homepage.  It was very interesting to see the conversations getting fed into my stream seamlessly without having to refresh the page like you need to do on Twitter.  I do wish the tweets streamed a bit slower so I could read all of them.  I found myself trying to read really fast to keep up with the flow.

For businesses, Twitterfall is an easy way to search trending topics in your industry/field and follow other trending topics in real-time.  It’s especially useful for companies who use Twitter as a form of customer service and watch conversations in real-time.  With this service, companies can quickly respond to customer feedback and questions.

Twitterfall is a free service with a donation button on the homepage.

http://twitterfall.com

Twitter: @twfall

Tweetalarm is a simple yet very useful service that lets you track keywords on Twitter and get an alert in your email when someone tweets about them.

This is a free service and all you have to do in order to start using it is sign up at tweetalarm.com. Once you register and login, you’re asked to add keywords to watch. For example, I added “SDForum,” (a client of ours) but you can add as many as you want. You can also add users whose tweets you are not interested in (for instance, your own tweets if you’re monitoring your brand). You can then choose whether you want to receive alerts or not, and how often (daily, weekly, or as they happen). Finally, you can choose to be alerted on English tweets only.

This is what the interface looks like:

Now that my settings have been saved, I should start receiving daily alerts with tweets containing the keyword “SDForum.” But after a week, I am still not receiving any alerts, which I find quite strange considering that I’ve used Tweetalarm before and it worked just fine… So I can show you an old alert for the same keyword, “SDForum”:

As you can see, each Twitter user in the email alert has a hyperlink. If you clink on it you’ll be directed to a page in the tweetalarm website where you can see the user’s Twitter timeline. From the emai, you can also decide to “ignore” a user and stop receiving tweets containing your keyword posted by that user.

Tweetalarm is as simple as this, which is very nice, but I wanted to compare results with those of a different search tool, TweetDeck for instance. A simple comparison with the tweets for “SDForum” I saved from TweetDeck on the same day when I received this Tweetalarm email alert shows that results are exactly the same.

So overall this is a good tool, too bad it hasn’t been working for me for the past week!