Use Social Media More Effectively with Crowdbooster

Anyone who’s anyone in the social media game these days is familiar with Klout. It’s a service that measures your social media influence across multiple platforms by determining who you engage with and how effectively you engage with them. It’s a great metric for determining who you influence, how much you influence them, and what you’re influential about. But what if you want to take it a step further, and make your social media engagement more effective? Crowdbooster is a (relatively) new service designed to do just that.

Crowdbooster gives you “tweet-level” metrics on how your message fares on its journey toward reaching as many people as possible. Then, it gives you actionable suggestions of how to utilize that information to increase your influence. Crowdbooster is presently in closed beta, and while anyone can sign up for an invite, you can never be sure of how long the waiting list is. I was fortunate enough to score an invite through Klout, and here is what I’ve found.

Getting Started

First things first: let’s get your account set up. After counting down the hours like a child on Christmas, finally receiving your beta invite means that you can jump in and get started. Crowdbooster will attempt to connect with your Twitter account, and the Twitter API prompt that all of us social media enthusiasts are all to familiar with will appear. Give Crowdbooster permission to access the data from your Twitter account, and it will begin compiling your information.

Crowdbooster is going to take a while to get your information on lock-down, but I promise, it’s worth it. You’ll be able to use certain functionality as it becomes available, but the full process may take much longer than you’d expect. For example, I’ve been using Crowdbooster for several days and I’m still getting the “processing” message.

The app is crawling through your Twitter account, gathering all (up to 3200) past tweets, and cataloging information like @mentions, retweets, and followers to find out exactly how much impact each of your tweets has made.

You can add more accounts later (more Twitter accounts, or a non-personal Facebook page). I haven’t tried managing multiple accounts, but if you do, it seems safe to assume you’d deal with a compounded processing time.

Step 1: The Data

Crowdbooster has you all scoped out and your data is ready to go. Now what? Well, I’m not your brand’s marketing team, but I can show you what data is available and how you might be able to glean important information about your audience.

The first (and probably most important) thing you’ll notice on the Crowdbooster interface is the graph titled “How are my tweets doing?” This graph can also be viewed as a table, and is scalable to the past week, the past month, all time, or a custom timeline. The x-axis of this graph is retweets, and the y-axis is the number of impressions a tweet made (or, the sum of your followers plus the followers of your retweeters). The larger the bubble denoting a tweet, the more replies (in other words, the more engaged your audience was). The bubbles are color coded, so this graph really provides you with an at-a-glance metric for how your tweets are doing and where you could improve.

See those tweet-bubbles? Click on any one of those bad boys to get some in depth information on it’s impact. Below the graph you’ll see the tweet itself, as well as any retweets and replies that it garnered.

Dig a bit deeper and find out exactly what makes your audience tick. The sidebar of the interface has a few more screens that will tell you how things are going. Follower Growth shows yet another graph, but this one tracks the followers you’ve gained and lost, and when you’ve gained and lost them.

The Influential Followers tab shows you a list of the users that follow you who have the largest number of followers. We’ll talk more about action later, but a direct use of information like this would be targeting those users (particularly the ones who are influential in the same field as you) with a message that they’d be likely to pass on to their followers.

The sidebar also has some information that updates in real-time. If your social media strategery works, you’ll be watching those numbers climb as the retweets, mentions, and followers pour in.

A brief aside: there is an upgraded “Business” tier of the service, which adds a small bit of extra functionality. It’s only $20/month, so if you’re looking for detailed analytics for several accounts to leverage in your companies marketing efforts, the beefier package might be what you want. Upgrading to the Business package boosts your maximum number of accounts from 3 to 10, and allows you to export customized reports of your account’s data. So get those reports printed on some nice poster board and go rock your team meeting.

Step 2: Take Action!

This is it. The meat and potatoes of Crowdbooster. See where your efforts are effective, and where they could use some work, and act on it. How, you ask? Well, Crowdbooster can’t tell you what to say, where’s the fun in that? But it can give you a little nudge in the right direction, by providing some actionable suggestions on engaging your audience.

All that waiting while Crowdbooster pried into your Twitter account like a nosy mom actually paid off. Based on the success of your past tweets, and when your followers are most active, Crowdbooster throws down an hourly calendar for the week telling you exactly when to tweet to achieve maximum effectiveness. And to help you out, you can actually schedule tweets for a future day/time directly from Crowdbooster.

Schedule a tweet, direct it at someone important, and say something meaningful. It’s as easy as that.

Conclusion

While the Business package is a paid upgrade, Crowdbooster has promised that the personal tier of service will remain free forever. Even though it’s still in closed beta, I highly suggest that you sign up for an invite, because tracking this information is fun and can be quite enlightening, even just for your personal account.

It’ll be interesting to see where development goes with Crowdbooster, since it’s already such a useful service. Have you had any success with Crowdbooster, or any other services like it?