SocialBro introduces real-time Twitter analytics

A Spanish startup SocialBro aims to run the numbers on a brand's twitter community and those of its competitors, thus distilling the results. Now with Real Time Twitter Analytics one can also see which users are online, what languages they predominantly speak, and how many followers they have as a group.

What I like about SocialBro the most is the ability to find target groups of users and easily follow, unfollow or add them to a list. One can do that with pretty much any Twitter account or a list. I have been playing with the tool for quite some time, and have summarized below the main questions SocialBro helps to answer.

How does your community change over time?

First of all, one can keep track of one's community metrics over time. One can synchronize it regularly to know how the numbers of followers and friends change. One can also see a number of hyperactive users, as well as dormant accounts, or those who do not follow the account back or stopped following recently. Unfollowing back is easy: Select up to 24 accounts at a time and unfollow in bulk.  One can also keep track of his or her PeerIndex and that of one's community members which comes handy for further analysis.

Learn about your community: language, time zone, influence

One can see how Twitter community ranks by PeerIndex and number of followers, or how many users come from a particular time zone. Other filters include number of friends, followers, ratio of friends to followers, age of the account, frequency of tweets amongst other metrics. Advanced search function helps find users who use a particular word, let's say "technology" or "seo" or "social media" in their Twitter profile description.

Having established the group of, for example, Spanish-speaking users, one can tag them and export them into an Excel file for further number-crunching.

If reciprocity is of importance, one can also see a list of those friends who do not follow back and simply unfollow them all, or sort them based on their influence or a number of followers and unfollow selectively.

Keep track of your competitors' community

SocialBro allows analyzing followers and friends of any Twitter account. One can filter the followers of a competitor, add them to another list or follow them. Following large numbers of users is not recommended though as Twitter penalizes mass following and unfollowing.

Public lists

In the same way one can analyze any public Twitter list and follow the listed twitter accounts individually or add them to an existing or new list.

Real Time Analytics

As if this was not enough, today SocialBro introduces Real Time Analytics. The new dashboard shows which users are online at the present time, how many followers they have, what language they speak, and what apps they are using. This can be useful for brands to help them tailor their message for their audience. If instead they use individual twitter handles for various language groups, they can simply use "Best time to tweet" option to know when most of their users are on Twitter based on historical data. In addition one can analyze a hash tag, or users within a particular list.

There are other Twitter analytics tools out there. For example SocialBakers has recently introduced its Twitter analytics feature, which does not go further than to compare a number of Twitter accounts based on the increase in followers, number of tweets, mentions and a response rate.  Sprout Social has a more comprehensive analytics tool, but it still focuses more on the content and interaction than on analyzing the community itself. It does allow following individual users based on the past interaction, but does not allow adding them to a list simultaneously. Bulk actions are not available either.

SocialBro is available as an app for Chrome or desktop. It is free now and it is being used by major brands such as CocaCola, IBM, PayPal and 50 000 other users. Free version limits the "Best time to tweet" option to the top 100 users and will not analyze other twitter accounts which have community of over 5000. Also, the service is aavailable only for the Twitter accounts with less than 250 000 followers. According to Javier Buron, the co-founder and COO of e24apps.com which develops SocialBro, the premium option will be introduced in March 2012.

SocialBro – Real-time analytics for Twitter from Socialbro Explore your community on Vimeo.