I’ve had an account with Crowdbooster for the last couple of weeks, but wanted to give it a bit of time before even attempting to give it any kind of review.
What is it?
Crowdbooster helps you achieve an effective presence on Twitter and Facebook. We show you analytics that aren’t based on abstract scores but numbers that are connected to your business and your social media strategies: impressions, total reach, engagement, and more. We then give you the tools and recommendations you need to take action and improve each one of these metrics.
The concept is a good one – measurement, metrics, analysis and actions based on them. However until you actually use the tool it’s quite hard to see what they mean or if they’ve achieved it.
The service comes in a three flavours, varying from the free account which is limited to 3 social media accounts, to the “business” one at $20 / month which can take 10 accounts or the “agency” one which is unlimited, but also doesn’t have any published pricing. Both the free account and the business one are limited to one user, which I’d see a rather large limitation if they’re targeting businesses.
But what about the actual service itself?
First off – a word of warning – when you first signup you are NOT going to be “wowed”, if anything you’ll be left wondering what, if any, purpose the service serves.
Why?
Well the way it works is based on analysis of your Twitter account(s) and your Facebook page(s). It will analyse some of your activity prior to your account activation, but it only really starts to “work” on your account from when you signup. So to actually be able to do anything useful with it you need to signup, connect your accounts and then leave it alone for a few days. After a few days it will hopefully have enough data for you to be able to actually do something with it.
I setup my account to pull in data related to my personal Twitter account (@mneylon) the company’s main account (@blacknight) and the company’s Facebook page, as is reflected in the screenshot below.
So this is roughly how my “dashboard” for the @mneylon Twitter account currently looks – I’ve highlighted a couple of things that caught my eye
The most important part would seem to be the “recommendations”, which are based in part on the activity analysis (the big graph bit below). Based on what they’ve seen so far they’re suggesting that I tweet at a specific time as that’s when I tend to get the best response.
They make the recommendation that bit more useful by offering you the ability to schedule a tweet to go out at the appropriate time, which is a nice feature.
What’s also quite interesting is the “engage” call to action, though when you explore it further it’s not as helpful as it could be. It essentially tells you about users with a high Klout score that have recently followed you. While that’s a nice idea it doesn’t tell you if they are still following you or not, so it’s not nearly as useful as it could be.
There’s an “influential followers” dashboard which is, again, semi-useful, but doesn’t tell you anything more than those users follow you ..(it’s not even clear if they’re still following you.. )
The Facebook analytics work along the same lines as the ones for Twitter. While the data is already available in Facebook indirectly, Crowdbooster does a very good job of linking the reaction to a specific message, which is useful. Unfortunately there’s no way to schedule a Facebook update, which would be a nice feature to have. As the Facebook API does support 3rd party applications posting to pages it is technically possible to do it, so it’s a pity they haven’t enabled that.
So while the system has got a couple of nice features it’s got more potential than anything else at the moment.
The lack of multi-user access is a shortcoming and there are several other areas where there is a clear opportunity that they haven’t taken advantage of. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.
Is it worth using? Possibly, but it’s not a “game changer” for me at least.
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