One of the first resources we created when starting Rabbit in early 2010 was a list of 20 free social media evaluation tools.   Not measurement, evaluation.  Tools that will give you some form of meaningful data that you can use in reports.  And ones that don’t cost anything.

Fast forward almost two years and a lot of that list is out of date, with many of the originals no longer being around or having ‘upgraded’ to full paid for services.  As a result, it’s time for a refresh.

This is by no means an extensive list, there are other tools around in addition to these, but even a few of them together will provide you with meaningful intelligence.   The 20 are as follows:

1 – Alexa.com
Gives you stats on websites, including global rank, country rank, number of sites linking in, and good basic audience data including demographics.

2 – Amplicate
Like a lot of services, Amplicate operates a fremium model.   A quick search, which will give you a ‘hate’ vs ‘love’ snapshot for a brand is free.   Pay $19 and you get a year’s worth of data.   And for $199 you can download various industry reports.

Amplicate also has a blog with various useful bits of information (for example, apparently half of online chatter about Foursquare in 2011 was negative ).

3 – Board Reader
Board Reader will search for mentions across forums (including sites like Quora) and will also churn out a chart based on mentions over time.

4 – Blogscope
One of the giants in professional sentiment analysis alongside the likes of Radian6 and Lithium is Canadian research firm Sysomos.   Sysomos originated from University of Toronto research and in fact, some of that is still live on Blogscope.

We’ve had periodic problems connecting to the site, but when its live, it is good for a free service.  The charts it produces aren’t pretty, but they are useful.

5 – Facebook Insights
This should be standard for anyone who works in social media.   Free to access for any Page admin, this provides an in-depth picture of fans’ interactions with your page.

This allows you to post content at the most optimum time, to identify the type of content your fans engage with the most and gives a pretty accurate demographic breakdown. Knowing where your fans come from and what they do on your page when they get there allows you to tailor your strategy more effectively.

6 – Follower Wonk
Follower Wonk makes sense of yours, or someone else’s Twitter feed.  You start with 150 credits, with every search costing 30-40 credits (the idea being that after that you pay).

Follower Wonk is useful in giving you the equivalent of the Facebook ‘friends of friends’ metric, you can dissect a Twitter feed to see what type of users they reach in terms of followers and influence.

7 – Feed Compare
A lot of blogs run their RSS feeds through the Google-owned Feedburner.  If they do, you can run them through Feed Compare to look at subscriber numbers – arguably a more useful metric than visitors as this measures engaged users who subscribe to a blog via a feed.

8 – Google Insights
One that is easily overlooked is Google’s Insights tool.  This is not only useful in tracking brands, but also sector specific areas and how they work across different regions.

For example, Google News – cheese vs milk vs butter in the UK

9 – How Sociable
Though as with many of these services, the idea is to get you to subscribe (starting at $19 a month), a free search will give you a range of influence metrics across different social networks.   Useful if you track over time, or are doing a quick competitive search.

10 – Ice rocket trends

In addition to running a blog and news search engine, Ice Rocket has a trends tool.   This allows you to compare a number of search terms, giving you a basic graph of how they compare in share of voice.

11 – Klout / Peerindex / Kred

The three main sentiment scoring systems, Klout is trying to establish itself as the de facto industry standard, while Kred is the newest entrant and one that shows a lot of promise.

Services like Klout do have flaws (we’ve explored these more in our Rabbit Feed on influence), but both Klout and Peerindex are useful for the ability to create lists which can be public or private.   Essentially you can set up a league table of brands across a certain industry sector and track their scores over time.

12 – Mention Map
A great visual tool, Mention Map tells you who an Twitter user speaks to the most.   Good for tracking the influencers of influencers.

13 – Social Mention
An excellent free social search engine with basic analytics including sentiment and top keywords.   Recommended.

14 – Statbrain
Very often you will want to estimate the traffic of a site where you’ve been featured.  Statbrain will give you an approximation of how many weekly visitors any site gets.

15 – Statigram

With Instagram breaking into the ranks of top tier social networks, there will be more of a need to analyse Instagram activity.   Statigram is a free service with a number of different elements.   You can view Instagram images via your browser, and set up a custom URL to direct people to (e.g. http://statigr.am/bmibaby).

You can manage your followers, and you can also get useful data about the type of engagement your posts are getting, your most committed followers and the times of day to post.

16- Timely
When is the best time to tweet to hit the optimum number of followers?  Timely gives you the answer.  A more sophisticated service also looking at Facebook and giving you data on influencers is Crowd Booster http://crowdbooster.com/, which comes in at $20 a month for 10 accounts.

17 – Twitter Counter
Another free service with premium (paid for) features, this tracks your Twitter follower count over time.   To get data on retweets and mentions, prices start at $15 a month.

18 – Tweetreach
As the name says, Tweetreach will tell you how far a tweet has gone in terms of reach (no of people who in theory saw it) and who the most influential tweeters of a certain term are.   The first 50 results are free, making it useful to get a real-time snapshot of activity.   If you want a more in-depth report, that will cost you $20

19 – Trendistic
Trendistic tracks Twitter trends over time.   Input a search term to see how it’s performed.   You can also embed a code to have a chart change dynamically on your site.

20 – Visual.ly 
Visual.ly is a kind of DIY info graphics service.  In Visual.ly labs there is a tool meant to be fun in which you compare your Twitter profile against someone else’s, but this can just as easily be used for brands.

Finally a word on consistency and tracking these tools over time.   You will only get the best out of them if you use them regularly.

For example, whatever the benefits or otherwise of Klout, it does give you the ability to benchmark yourself against your peers and also track progress on a week by by week basis to see if you are improving or if things are getting worse.  As a result, our advice would be to choose a handful of the above tools and stick with them.

We’ve saved this list as a Delicious Stack, you can access it here

(Top image – Tiny Apartment Crafts)

Related articles

• A guide to social media influence (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Would You Rather Have Klout… or Kred? (socialtimes.com)
• You Might Have Klout, But What’s Your Kred? (techcrunch.com)
• Social Media Digest:Kred launch, Heinz Facebook and Hacking (umpf.co.uk)

Comscore and Telefonica (the European telecoms giant that owns 02) have come out with a study about the use of smartphones and the Internet in Europe.

The research tells us that in the UK (48%) and Spain (48%) almost half of us are now smartphone (as opposed to ‘feature phone’) owners.   Across the five biggest EU states, the average is 42%.

Other key findings are as follows:

Android leads in phone sales, Apple dominates in mobile web traffic

Who is bigger, Android or Apple?  That depends how you look at it.

In terms of smartphone ownership, there are certainly more Android (28%) phones and iPhones (21% of the smartphone market).   Indeed phones running Google’s mobile operating system are on the verge of overtaking Symbian (i.e. current and previous generation Nokia).

However in terms of actual mobile operating systems, Apple iOS is in front, 30% to 27%.  This is because Apple’s mobile operating system is also on later generation iPod Touches and of course iPads.

Crucially Apple devices account for 62% of mobile digital traffic in the big EU states compared to 22% for Android.   Personally I think that is because someone walking into a shop wanting to buy “a phone” is now likely to be steered towards one of the cheaper Android devices.   However someone buying an iPhone is doing so consciously and at least in part because of the array of apps on offer.

That’s a stat worth bearing in mind when skewing mobile campaigns towards different devices.   It is also worth noting recent US stats showing that the iPhone 4S helped Apple overtake Android in the American market in Q4.

Finally, while the Internet in Europe is now female dominated, Comscore says that most smartphone (56.3%) owners are men.   There is evidence from other research that Android is very male biased, while iPhones have a more even male / female spread.

21% of UK web traffic to family sites from mobiles

The share of web traffic from mobile devices is still relatively small, 5% (7.7% in the UK).   However, remember that % is skewed by the amount of web traffic coming from office based PCs.

Also the picture is very different when you look at different categories.   In the UK, a quarter of traffic to automotive sites came from smartphones, while tablets and phones together accounted for 21%of visits to family and parenting websites (this includes kids sites like Disney).

Target smartphone and tablet owners in the evening 

As the above table shows, PC traffic is highest during the day, while smartphone and (especially) tablet traffic peaks in the evening, as well as during peak commuter hours (8am and 6pm).   Something to bear in mind if running a campaign targeted at users of mobile only networks such as Instagram.

Shoppers use their phones while in store

Research in the summer showed that 1/4 of online shopping conversations actually happen in-store l.  In fact, over a fifth of European smartphone owners have taken a product photo in-store, while 1/10 sent it to their family and friends.

Surprisingly, given the mixed evidence about the adoption rate of QR codes, 10.9% scanned a barcode in store.   Meanwhile 14.9% of German and 13.2% of UK smartphone owners claim to have actually scanned a QR or barcode of any description – it doesn’t actually say whether these scans were successful or not.

Finally, over one in twenty  (6.4%) smartphone owners have compared produce prices while in a store, a stat that is only going to increase given apps such as the Amazon price comparison one, where you scan a product in store and get the equivalent Amazon price

Related articles

• The iPhone Strikes Back! Android’s Share Of New Smartphone Purchases Has Collapsed (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Apple Back On Top As Bestselling Smartphone In The U.S. (paidcontent.org)
• Apple Surpasses Android To Become Reigning Champion In The U.S. [Report] (cultofmac.com)
• Q4 data shows that iPhone beat out all Android phones (electronista.com)

Recently various figures have come out about the growth of Google+.  Just today The Guardian  reports on the network seeing 67 million visitors in November, with 2.7 million of those coming from the UK (the US is the biggest market with close to 15 million visitors).

Meanwhile, Hitwise is shouting about 49 million US visits (as opposed to visitors) in December . And when it comes to actual accounts, Ancestry.com’s founder Paul Allen has been keeping track of the service and estimated that there were 60+ million live as of Christmas.

Yet at the same time, for many of us with Google+ accounts these figures don’t seem to make a great deal of sense.  I suspect I am not untypical in that I’ve created a profile, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm don’t use it very much.  There seems to be a disconnect between raw visitor numbers and engagement and I wanted to see if I could dig into this a little bit more.

• First of all the numbers.  Remember that these figures are monthly and includes someone who might only access the site once.   They don’t measure actual activity.

• 14.7 million US visitors sounds impressive, but a post by Sysomos says that this is actually only a 10% growth since late Sept

• Similarly in November, the LA Times reported on the fact that, despite there being some impressive growth spurts, traffic actually dropped in 11 out of 21 weeks, with fluctuations of 10-20% from one week to the next

• Finally, the Hitwise number for December mentioned above sounds huge.   However, Digital Trends highlights a figure that I think is key.   For the week of 17 December, Hitwise tracked nine million visits.   By comparison, in September, Google+ was managing 15 million visits a week with a much lower user base

Why do articles such as the one in today’s Guardian keep on presenting the big numbers without digging deeper into what those numbers actually mean? I think the article on the Sysomos website has got it right – “people really, really want Google+ to succeed.”

There’s been a lot of talk about the next Facebook, and Google+ has been held up as the most likely candidate.

Google+ isn’t the next Facebook.  It could be the next Twitter

My own view is that Google+ is not a failure in the waiting.   It also isn’t the next Facebook.   Facebook is more dominant in social media than Google is in search.  With Facebook having a 95% share of social media time in the US it just won’t happen – for now.

In fact a better parallel isn’t between Google+ and Facebook, but between Google+ and Twitter.  Sure, the networks are very different but there are a lot of similarities in the growing pains and user profiles of both. There was a time, around 2008/2009 when people also ‘really, really’ wanted Twitter to succeed. Then in 2009 / 2010 the first questions about engagement on Twitter started to appear.

At the time some people compared it to the virtual world Second Life (which attracted an enormous amount of hype in 2007, without the user numbers ever justifying it) .   I predict that in 2012 we’ll see similar stats rolled out about Google+, showing that most accounts are barely active or dormant.

Fast forward to today, and Twitter’s user base is impressive, yet even back in March, the evidence was that a relatively small number of ‘elite’ users – 20k people – were responsible for 50% of activity  Behind a large number of casual users there is a very committed, small but influential ‘core’.

I suspect the same holds true for Google+ And so despite only having 1/3 of Twitter’s numbers (and a much smaller proportion of time), Twitter has consistently punched above its weight in terms of influence.

Case in point – in 2011 it was Twitter and not Facebook that dominated the mainstream news agenda.

Image – Sean MacEntee

Related articles

• Google+ Tops Facebook’s Growth Rate (socialmayonnaise.com)
• How Google+ Is Changing the Web, Even Though No One Wants It To (hubspot.com)
• Hitwise: U.S. Google+ traffic leaps 55 percent in December (news.cnet.com)
• Google+ Posts Strong December Growth Numbers (coated.com)

Over at Rabbit, we publish a monthly series of social media guides.  This time around, I’ve put together an overview of the different social media influence systems that try and tell brands how “important” someone is on social channels – it is embedded above.

These scores are not just academic or good for a bout of social media navel-gazing, they now serve practical purposes.

Case in point, Klout scores are built into the two main social media team management systems hootsuite and cotweet.   If you call out a brand, chances are the person at the other end will now be looking at how influential Klout deems you to be.

As the report implies, I am not a big fan of Klout – and that’s not because I lost 14 points in the recent Kloutapocalypse!

Kred however does seem to hold a lot of promise: The transparency in calculating scores (as opposed to Klout’s secret sauce approach) and the different influence scores for different communities are welcome innovations.

(To view, go into full screen mode above.  It is also available to download from our Issuu page - issuu.com/therabbitagency)

Related articles

• Further Reflections on Klout. [Nic Oliver] (ecademy.com)
• What is Klout worth to you? (nevillehobson.com)
• 17 Alternatives to Klout (Source: Read Write Web) (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Klout’s New Metrics Upsetting Bloggers (blogher.com)
• The Measured Life: What’s Your Klout Score? (sportsgeek.com.au)
• How To Manage Your Online Influence (link-assistant.com)

That’s the headline figure from a post in the Marketing Sherpa blog by David Kirkpatrick

David’s post lists a case study from centerbeam, a ‘technology infrastructure company’ – basically a b2b IT business.  centerbeam used to use tele and email sales as well as a pay per click search programme.   The latter wasn’t working so money was put into content marketing instead.

An outside supplier was contracted to create 50 articles on the site per month, the content had to be exclusive to the centerbeam site, it was keyword optimised and broken into six topics.

The content isn’t simply SEO fodder, a look at the centerbeam news page displays the type of headings that someone interested in (say) Cloud Computing would be interested in.  In other words, there is a focus on quality as well as quantity and stuffing copy with keywords.

The results?

First of all centerbeam successfully applied to be listed within Google News, if someone did search for Cloud Computing or Green IT they might come across a CenterBeam piece.   I’d think primarily as a result of that, visitors from non paid search is up 43%, google search performance is up 56% and news landing page traffic is up 152%.

Two observations though.  First of all in the nicest way possible, the site design isn’t great and the content doesn’t link through to other areas that might give me more information and cause me to stay.

Secondly , there is no obvious button to share the content they’ve spent money creating.   Content + Search is a good approach.   Content + Social + Search is better.

Related articles

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Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots on Google get 58% of clicks.  

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

That chimes in with an earlier Chitika study, showing that the no 1 spot on Google gets 34.35% of traffic.   Optify also says that being any further back than page two has no real business value for you at all.

Not surprisingly, as I work for a social media agency, I am a big believer in SEO + social working together.    For example, Comscore has shown that 50% of ‘social media exposed’ surfers search for product terms every day compared to 33% of non-exposed surfers.    In other words, SEO can help improve your rankings but social media can prompt them to try and find out more in the first place.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good summary of how search engines are tapping into social.  As (MIcrosoft) Bing’s Paul Yiu says in the piece, “search up until recently has been a lonely experience.    We want to introduce people as an important part of search.”

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• Bing Tests New Homepage Layout #SEWatch (seome.me)
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• Foursquare Wants To Pair With Google, Yahoo, Bing And Other Search Players @SEWatch (seome.me)

In other words so-called silver surfers are now spending more time on the world’s no 1 social network than they are reading the news or searching Google.   Comscore also tells us that the over 55s spend more time than other age groups on ebay and property website Rightmove.

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Recently, Gartner and IDC poured cold water on reports that Android is the now the world’s number one smartphone platform.   In light of that, these stats from Comscore might be interesting.

Comscore shows that Symbian (Nokia) is continuing to lose market share in Europe.  Having had 63% of the smartphone market in the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) in December 2009, by December 2010 that had gone down to 47.8%.

Comscore says that most of those lost Symbian users are now walking around with Android handsets, with Google’s mobile platform now having 11.9% of the European smartphone market.

This tallies with previous research reinforcing the fact that iPhone users have extremely high brand loyalty, and that while Android might grow market share overall it won’t be at the expense of Apple.    In fact, Apple’s share of the European smartphone market grew from 13.8 to 20% during the same period.

Related articles

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Some stats from Comscore, Apple has over a quarter (28.1%) of the UK smartphone market, not far behind Nokia’s Symbian (32.2%).

However the inevitable rise of the Google Android platform continues.  Google had 14.9% of the UK smartphone market in October, compared to 5% back in May.

To put those stats into context with other pieces of research:

• Certainly in the Summer, Apple led Google in European (as opposed to just UK) smartphone sales, meaning that Europe is a relatively strong territory for Apple.  Globally of course, Android subscriptions are ahead of iPhones.

• However while Android sales are ahead in the US, iPhones are still the most desired smartphones.   Android phones are by and large cheaper and so desire doesn’t always equate to actual purchases.

• Smartphone use among men and women in the UK is nearing 50/50 (or 53% / 47%) at least among 15-24 year plds.   The US is currently the only market where more young women than men own smartphones.

• Both in the UK and US, Android phones are far more popular among men than women, with Android having a so-called “Dude” problem

• Around a third of 15-24 year olds in the US (33%) and UK (36%) have a smartphone as opposed to a feature phone.    In the Summer, a quarter (26.5%) of all European mobile phone subscribers (all age groups) had a smartphone.  The figures for the US were just under a fifth (17%)

Related articles

• US, UK young women smartphone buyers (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Google Android Apps being downloaded at a rate of 103/sec with 200,000 on offer: Estimates put Android market ahead of Apple iOS & Windows Phone OS by 2014! (devicemag.com)
• Official PlayStation app for iPhone & Android 1.6+ is Coming Soon (geniusgeeks.com)
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TubeMogul compared 103 million video streams found via social networks and search engines.   Videos sourced on Twitter had an average viewing time of two minutes and seven seconds.  Yahoo! (1 min 54 secs) and Facebook (1 min 50) came next with Google and Bing trailing behind.

The shrinking shelf life of online videos
Bad news for any of us hoping that our online videos will become slow burners and gather viewers over time.   In 2008 it took the average video two weeks to get half its 90 day view total…now online videos reach that in six days.

If nothing else, these stats do show that social media ‘recommended’ online videos will get people watching for longer.  An eariler Visible Measures study showed that after 60 seconds you will have lost 44% of your viewers.   So if you have a video campaign about to break that you want to go viral, it helps for it to have support from the Twitter community.

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• Facebook referrals result in longer video views (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
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