There’s a relatively new service out there, that’s getting less attention than it deserves… it’s called Bottlenose. And it brings a lot to the table, if you want to know how your social media efforts are working out.
I know… there are a lot of social media measurement tools out there. Some of them offer some limited value in one narrow area, but in my opinion, none of them provide a meaningful portrayal of your brand’s reach across various platforms.
I think a bit part of the problem is that most of them are trying to assign a composite “score”, when they’re really only looking at engagement across a few different social platforms and essentially, just averaging them.
But you can’t look at Twitter, Facebook and Google under the same microscope. The metrics need to be entirely different for each, so even if you could assign a meaningful score to each, trying to marry those scores into one would render the results invalid.
And while I’m at it, I may as well say…. I haven’t been at all impressed with the way any of those “tools” are extracting their scores.
Now, though, I’m impressed with what one company is offering.
There’s a new game in town
Okay, “new” isn’t entirely accurate. But if you’re not already using Bottlenose, believe me, you’ll find it very new. Before we dive into this, let’s talk about what Bottlenose is and isn’t.
It isn’t just a tool, at least no more than Google or Blekko are tools. Bottlenose is a real-time social intelligence engine. Don’t confuse that with a search engine… Bottlenose is a Now Engine™. For searching, monitoring, analyzing, targeting and engaging visitors, in real-time, it has no competition. Let’s take a look at some of the features it offers:[list type=”star2″]
- Trending articles, content and images
- Live geographic, demographic social media monitoring
- Analysis of Content and topic trends, audience engagement, influencers and deep sentiment
- Psychographic insights
- Mapping conversions
- Measuring across languages
- Key Social Performance Indicators
[/list]Oh, and let’s not forget their Sonar – where you can observe live conversion trends! And the beauty of it is, you can simultaneously look at Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, RSS feeds and more, individually or in any combination.
You can use Bottlenose to search and track individual topics, without even registering. But the real gold is in connecting to your social profiles and seeing how your brand appears in the social graph.
And when you’re in the Sonar mode you can hover over any of the nodes in the graph and get really granular.
The capabilities of Bottlenose are far too numerous to explain here. The best way to see what it can do for you is to simply go over there and register. Then tie your social media accounts to it and in seconds, you’ll have a wealth of information in front of you, like this:
There’s plenty more good information to be extracted, too. If you want to see how much traction a tweet got on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can map that, as well.
For now, Bottlenose is still in a private invite-only beta mode, but according to their website, they’ll be opening up soon and releasing a Pro version. Since there’s no other comparable social intelligence engines around, I suggest you check it out now and apply for beta access. You won’t even have to register to give it a spin. If social media is an important part of your business’ activities, you’ll be glad you did.
And if social isn’t part of your business’ program, don’t you think it’s about time you joined the 21st century?
Impressive post! Well done.