Blog

Where to find awesome SocialBro content

2013-06-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

We here at SocialBro HQ work hard to make sure we are constantly providing you with tips, ideas and information on how to get the most out of using the tools and features available in our platform. This blog post has been designed to make sure you know where to find them.

1. Our video channels

SocialBro has a Vimeo and Youtube channel, both displaying the same selection of videos including tutorials and the weekly webinars we have been holding. Topics covered include how to follow your competitor’s followers, cleaning up your Twitter community and how to analyze the stats provided by SocialBro. Check out this 20 minute workshop to see how to optimize your tweets using the Best time to tweet report and our integrations with Bufferapp and Hootsuite.

2. Our comprehensive user guide

The SocialBro user guide shows you step by step how to use every feature and tool as well as giving you tips and practical examples. It is split up into sections to make navigation easy including exploring, managing and analyzing your community.

I’d recommend that you take a look at the practical examples in each section, which include using SocialBro to manage your event attendees, how to create a list with your competitor’s followers and using SocialBro to discover the interests of your community.

3. The SocialBro Slideshare account

A few months ago we created real life case studies demonstrating how different companies and agencies use SocialBro to achieve their Twitter marketing objectives. These can be viewed on our Slideshare account including the one displayed below, which details how the digital agency Hop Online uses SocialBro to build up high quality online relationships with Twitter users.

4. Twitter and Facebook

Due to the nature of our platform, we couldn’t not make use of Social media channels! We use our Twitter account to provide fast support to any users who have questions as well as to share social media tips and news about SocialBro. If we experience any technical problems that will affect our users, we use Twitter to make them aware of this as quickly as possible. Our Facebook page is used primarily to share SocialBro news and pictures of our team amongst other things :)

5. SocialBro’s Instagram profile

Check out our Instagram profile to see some behind the scenes pictures, including the SocialBro team hard at work. Does anyone remember the first look and feel of SocialBro? :)

If you’ve accessed any of these SocialBro channels, why not leave us a comment and tell us if you believe we are covering them in the right way, if you have found them useful or if there is anything you think we should be doing differently.

3 Uncommon Community Building Tips From HootSuite

2013-06-05T03:14:00.002-07:00

This is a guest post by HootSuite's community manager Connor Meakin

No matter what tool or service you are marketing, consider the ways in which you can diversify the user relationship with your brand through other mediums. Sometimes, you have to get unconventional in your approach to motivate and develop your communities.

When it comes to most SAAS tools specifically, customers use your product or service in a 2D context. What companies fail to realize, is that communities are built on mutual affection and rapport. It is the actions surrounding your product that builds this affection.

What problem are you solving for your users? Find the answer to this question and you will be in a better position to not only serve your community, but build it too.

With that, here are some unconventional tactics HootSuite uses to build community.

Cheap and Cheerful for the Win

Instead of outspending your competitors, out love them with branded swag! Creativity is key to keeping costs low and happiness high, so if you have seen it before, don’t do it. Instead, use your imagination and find interesting ways to tell the story of your brand.

Don’t worry about mass producing. Since you won’t know what swag is popular until you start distributing it, create small batches at the beginning. The important thing about giving out swag is to make them earn it.

Ask for a Tweet or Instagram on the spot with your handle or a hashtag (we use #HootKit or #HootSuite). Or (if possible) snap the photo yourself!

Then, you can use a tool like SocialBro to track the hashtag, find your new friends and curate / amplify / archive your awesome visual collateral.

Create demand for your swag through scarcity -- whether real or fabricated. At HootSuite our #HootKits are for loyal owls. We make them earn it, and some swag is much harder to get than others. For example, you can’t buy a HootSuite Tshirt -- you can only earn one!

Small Things Count: 2D to 3D

Retweets, comments and +1s are all examples of 2D interaction that create touchpoints (or that warm, fuzzy feeling) for your users. But if you want to shatter their expectations, get creative and mail them some swag.

At HootSuite, we mail swag all over the world from popular cities like London to exotic outreaches like Irkutsk, Russia.

When you mail swag (or anything) to one of your users, you shift the relationship from 2D to 3D.

The art of traditional letters is lost, so imagine how excited a user is when they see your hand-crafted, thoughtful gift amidst the cornucopia of flyers and bills.

Mailing #HootKits is HootSuite’s most powerful community building tactic and creates a touchpoint like no other.

The tricky part is finding a way to scale small things!

In the Cloud to on the Ground

To enhance the participation of your online community, get offline. There are plenty of ways: workshops, camps, networking events, tweetups -- the key is to keep it simple and participatory.

When you build a community around a product, you’ll soon realize that many users share similar interests despite having different cultural backgrounds. Commonly, over time, the social element of ‘social media’ gets a little run down.

HootSuite champions our HootUp program -- an initiative where we encourage our users to independently host an event similar to a MeetUp, but with more owls. Here, they share their experiences and connect with other local social media enthusiasts.

HootUps are hosted anywhere, and everywhere.They allow our users to get out from behind their computers and talk shop over tasty food and sometimes even a frosty beverage.

We see a range in HootUps from intimate (10-20 people) to large - complete with a presenter. In 2012, thanks to our incredible user base, we were able to host over 100 HootUps.

#Bonus: Don’t forget to gather artifacts from each event! The key is to make it easy to capture mementos.

Think photo-booths, hashtags, and check-ins. Then, once again, use a tool like SocialBro to search, archive, then reshare all the content with your community. These artifacts are powerful, as they create curiosity and demand when you share the stories online.

These few unconventional community building tactics will create meaningful relationships between your brand and it’s users. Remember to consider the gift your product or service is giving -- SAAS tools shouldn’t be boring!

You have the power to completely reinvent consumer expectations-- why not start now?

Have any other unconventional tactics to share? Leave a comment or hit us up @HootClub.

>>> Connor is HootSuite's Community Manager, North America; regularly sharing HootSuite stories on the HootSuite Blog. When not building community, you'll find him playing and following sports, high fiving strangers while running, and drinking too much coffee.

8 ways you can measure the effectiveness of your Twitter activity

2013-05-30T04:51:00.001-07:00

Once you have been actively using Twitter to generate leads, PR and business opportunities, you need to find ways to ensure that your efforts have been successful, so that you can make decisions on how to alter your activity in the future. This blog post is going to show you how you can measure the effectiveness of your Twitter activity using Twitter itself and SocialBro.

Remember different businesses want to achieve different things from using Twitter so we recommend creating SMART objectives in order to fully assess how well you are performing.

1. Evolution of your community

This first point might be obvious but one of the main ways to see that your Twitter activity is attracting attention is to look at your number of followers, which should be increasing along with your Twitter activity. If your tweets are interesting and engaging your reach should be expanding and your Twitter community will grow.

On your Twitter profile you can see your number of followers and friends so you can monitor that these are increasing, but your global stats panel in SocialBro shows you your evolution over time. You can pass your mouse over each dot to see the number of followers or friends you had on a specific day or drag and drop a box over a certain part of the graph to see your evolution for that period of time.

There is also a followers forecast, which is an estimation of how your community will grow in the near future and on your dashboard you can also see your recent new followers and the people who have unfollowed you. If your Twitter activity is having a positive effect on your community you should see a positive evolution.

2. Review the quality of your contacts

As we have mentioned in previous blog posts, the quality of your Twitter community is even more important than the numbers. SocialBro can help you monitor the quality of your community by showing you your verified and influential followers and the interests of your community displayed in tagclouds. It is useful to check that your followers’ bio tagclouds match with your friends’ bio tagclouds, as this is an indication that your community is made up of users relevant to your industry.

You can create customized widgets to be displayed on your dashboard to monitor certain segments of your community that are most important to you, for example if you want to attract marketing professionals who live in London, you can save this search and quickly find all of the users this applies to and see when new ones have followed you.

Tip: SocialBro also helps you clean up and increase the quality of your community by allowing you to detect inactive friends or potential spammers. For example you can filter your friends to find those who have a default avatar and those who have not tweeted in over 6 months, both indications of inactivity.

3. Monitor your influence

SocialBro uses Kred and the Peerindex Score to monitor your level of influence. Here you can check that your influence is increasing with your Twitter activity.

As Kred explains, “Influence is the ability to inspire action. It is scored on a 1,000 point scale. We measure Influence by assessing how frequently you are retweeted, replied, mentioned and followed on Twitter”, whilst “Outreach reflects generosity in engaging with others and helping them spread their message”. The PeerIndex Score measures online social interactions to determine your impact in social media and beyond.

If you find that your influence score is relatively low, the new “Tweet Analytics” tool can help you increase it by determining which of your tweets receive the best response from your followers. You can therefore alter your future posts according to what your followers retweet, reply to and favourite.

You can use the bio tagclouds to discover the interests of your community to create more personalized engagement and the Best Time to Tweet report to optimise your tweets by reaching the largest audience possible, which will both help you to increase your influence.

4. Analyze the impact of your tweets

Two traits of successful people. Hardworking + Humble.
— Aaron Lee (@AskAaronLee) May 22, 2013

When you post tweets that followers like they will retweet and favourite them or reply with comments or answers to your questions. When you look at a tweet in Twitter or using our “Tweet Analytics” tool you can visualize how many retweets and favourites it has received as well as the comments people have posted.

Using SocialBro you can also see how many people have clicked your Bitly links, reply to multiple people at once or add a tag or note to the users who have performed an action to remember to come back to them in the future. The “Tweet Analytics” tool therefore allows you to judge how successful the different tweets you posted have been amongst your followers.

5. Promotion Code redemptions

Save £100 per booking on November to April long haul #holidays using online #discount code 36278 bit.ly/ZTglYA
— Thomson (@ThomsonHolidays) May 12, 2013

When tweeting promotions you can easily track how many people have used them by monitoring online redemptions, asking people to input a code or noting down how many times a code was quoted in store. This will show you how successful the promotion was. You can also track how many people clicked on the links to your website or blog from your Twitter posts.

“Twitter DM Campaigns” allows you to send out personalized DMs to a custom sample of your followers, making sure your messages are targeted at the right people. You can use this SocialBro tool to send out a promotional code to a segmented group of your followers and monitor the progress of your campaigns that include a Bitly link.

6. Keep track of your competitor’s community

One of the best and most useful features of SocialBro is the ability to analyze your competitor’s Twitter community. This allows you to view detailed stats about their followers and friends and analyze their account e.g. the quality of their community.

These stats can be compared to your own, allowing you to benchmark your activity against theirs and see your common followers and friends to ensure that you are attracting the right kind of people. It also brings other benefits such as the ability to follow your competitor’s followers or add them to lists to find ways to engage with them!

7. Compare your account against others

SocialBro’s “Accounts comparison” tool allows you to visualize charts such as the languages spoken by and the locations of your community, the number of verified followers you have, how many tweets your followers send per day etc., so that you can compare the stats about your community against your competitors.

This is useful for determining who makes up the three communities, the current quality of the three communities and how active your community is compared to your competitors’. You can also see the interests of all three communities displayed in bio tagclouds, which also acts as a way of helping you target your competitors’ followers.

8. Benchmark your growth against industry peers

SocialBro’s Benchmark tool can be used to gain a rough idea of whether your Twitter practices are progressing at the rate they should be. It compares your influence and the number of followers, friends, tweets and lists to accounts of a similar size, age and in a similar industry to your own.

This tool is useful as it takes into account that your competitors who you may usually compare yourself to might of been using Twitter a lot longer than you and therefore have a larger influence and following. Use this information to make decisions regarding your Twitter activity, e.g. trying to increase your influence or become included in more lists.

For information on how to perform any of the functions detailed above please see our user guide.

Q&A: Monica Zaldivar on the hard work of a community manager

2013-05-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

“Usually teams have a set of assumptions on how things should be, but user's feedback always surprises us and reminds us how important is to keep in touch with them”, comments Monica Zaldivar, community manager at Zoobe.com, which develops mobile apps “combining animated 3d characters with speech-analysis and rendering in the Cloud”.

Monica has been working as a community manager for a variety of startups for over four years and has been a user of SocialBro for a while now. In this interview, which is a result of a case study we did with her, she has offered to share her experience with our readers. Feel free to comment and share your own!

Hey Monica, could you please explain to our readers what is it that you tend to do on a daily basis?

At the moment I have shifted a bit from Community Management to Communications and Social Media, but as many other CMs, my job involves a bit of everything. I write texts for the blog and our Social Media channels, I monitor our brand, I gather feedback from our users and pass it on to the team, I work on reaching out to our potential users and reviewers, I check with whom we should be starting conversations and cooperations and where to invest our efforts and time.

As I said, lots of multitasking and having everything under control all the time. That is why I need useful and easy to understand tools like SocialBro on a daily basis.

Which aspect of your work would you say you enjoy the most?

I definitely enjoy solving people's problems and improving our services and products while I am at it. Meaning that every interaction with our users bring us insights on how they use our apps and what they don't understand about it, which is always quite fascinating.

Usually teams have a set of assumptions on how things should be, but user's feedback always surprises us and reminds us how important is to keep in touch with them. So that's definitely the part I enjoy the most, helping our users and understanding what they need, so I can give better insights to the team.

Why do you use SocialBro?

I have worked mostly with startups, which means tight budgets, big workloads and developing as many skills as possible in the shortest time. So as you can imagine, SocialBro has saved me plenty of times. As a Community Manager you also need to understand what everyone in your company is doing and have a visual and easy way to show them what you are doing.

That is where SocialBro is so helpful: I can showcase to others in 5 minutes what has been our progress in the last weeks, how I can effectively listen and understand who are our followers, and even more importantly, what other things these people find interesting apart from us. On top of that, the SocialBro team understood us Community Managers and gave us the option to pack all this information into a PDF that I can send as a report in less than 2 minutes.

Can you give some examples of how you use our platform?

I would say after the first minutes playing with SocialBro I was totally sold. When you sign up, you get to see a very visual overview of who your followers are and the ones you follow. The insights that SocialBro provides me and our team with have been invaluable. What are the topics they are interested in, location, age, languages and when are they active and engaging with you. That is exactly what I always wanted to know and Twitter was never providing me with.

With that information, SocialBro allows me to adapt my texts and messages to the audience I know I have, find inspiration of topics that I know are useful to them and maybe the feature I use the most, make the timing of my posts each time closer to perfect. I also appreciate the open and collaborative mindset of the SocialBro team, which seeks cooperations with other teams I admire, such as Bufferapp. Thanks to their work together, I can choose the best way and time to post Zoobe updates and tweak it every week.

What would you say is the most useful feature of SocialBro?

The analytics are really cool and visual, and my favourite insight is without a doubt "Best time to tweet" because it is something no other service that I know offers for free. I am aware that the analytics in the free version only take into account 100 top followers, but it is definitely a killer feature. It gives you a taste on how clever SocialBro is and gives you a reason to upgrade.

Then I really find the tagclouds useful as well: it helps me to figure out the interests of my followers and which topics resonate to them, so when I am choosing what content to share, I am much better at it!

What results have you achieved from all this hard work?

The first result I achieved with SocialBro was without a doubt wowing my workmates. They can see now how Twitter is not only about just tweeting and realise that the possibilities to connect with people are there waiting for us to make the most of. In the long run, keeping track of how you are doing and your growth is something all companies I have been in were demanding.

In a personal level, SocialBro is my way to evaluate myself: what worked, what I forgot to pay attention to, am I moving in the right direction? I never lose sight of what is really important for my followers thanks to the reminders SocialBro sends me with their reports and analysis.

Which other Social Media tools do you use and why?

Buffer is amazing to schedule your daily discoveries fast and easy so you are always surprising your followers with awesome content anytime. Combined with SocialBro’s "Best time to tweet" analytics and with Pocket, it really helps you to deliver great content spreading throughout the day to maximise the impact.

Mention is the best service I know to monitor your brand name: it gives you real time alerts of mentions across the whole Internet, filters and prioritizes the important ones and let's you answer fast and easy people talking about you.

I am also trying to decide if HootSuite and SproutSocial would be my way to go for a one-stop solution to manage all our communication channels. It's hard, because I really like to curate and post manually, choose what is best for each channel and keep the copy fresh and different in each. Another big issue is previewing how actually posts will look like, and none of them are really giving you that. But staying manual at this point is not that scalable, so I need to make a decision soon! I'll let you know my final decision when I have one ;)

Which social media and marketing blogs do you usually read?

I was totally in love with Undrip, a website and app that will give me the feed of the most popular links within my Facebook and Twitter network. Sadly they shut down recently, but they are working on even a better thing, so I can hardly wait for it.

But more on the side of information sources, http://allfacebook.de/ - http://allfacebook.com keeps you up to date on each move of Facebook, and they do at least one per day. Then Social Media Examiner, Francisco Rosales' SocialMouths and Jeremiah Owyang's Web-Strategist give you a deeper look into what is going on and where are we are actually heading. If you can only read one, then definitely Jeremiah Owyan’s: he is my hero.

Also Jan Heinemann in Germany is always curating the best content on new trends and strategies in the Online Marketing/ Social Media field, so if you are working in Germany that is what I would recommend. His Social Media Checklist made together with Jan-Hendrik Senf is genius:

I also have to say that sometimes blog posts are too long and I prefer my Google+ circles of interesting people posting about all kind of things. I am quite disperse and curious about everything :P My favourites are the ones curated by Robert Scoble, even circling them is quite a big information overload.

SocialBro now analyzes the content you share on Twitter!

2013-05-16T07:00:00.001-07:00

Today SocialBro is releasing a tool that covers a new area of Twitter analysis that we have not provided before! Now with “Tweet Analytics” you are able to analyze the content you share on Twitter as well as the users that have interacted with that content. This new addition means our platform, which has basically been focused on analyzing Twitter communities (your contacts, your competitor’s contacts, etc.), is now covering an essential part of social media, analysis of the content.

With “Tweet Analytics” you can measure how your tweets are performing in real-time on a daily basis and improve the effectiveness of the messages you post. When using Twitter for business, tweeting appropriate content for your audience is extremely important as it gains you followers, a high quality Twitter community and can turn your followers into clients and customers.

“Tweet Analytics” shows you:

How each tweet has performed (number of retweets, replies, favourites and mentions) displayed on a bubble chart and in list view.
Who has retweeted, replied to and favourited each tweet, with links to their information and Twitter profiles.
Your potential reach for each tweet.
How many people clicked your Bitly links.
Your overall performance on Twitter according to the social media metrics created by Avinash Kaushik, author of some of the most popular web analytics books worldwide.

You can find more details about the tool in our user guide.

How you can gain value from using “Tweet analytics”

Checking you are posting appropriate content

Being able to see how effective your tweets have been can be a way of identifying if you are posting appropriate content for your audience. If the number of retweets, replies and favourites your tweets receive are low, this could also be an indication that you are targeting the wrong type of followers; remember who is following you is important as you want them to have the potential to turn into leads and if they do, they should have an interest in the content you are tweeting.

“Tweets Analytics” also shows you your Conversion Rate, which measures how many replies you receive per tweet, which, according to Avinash Kaushik’s social media metrics, measures how well you understand your audience by making sure that what you tweet connects to your audience. With this tool you can also see the number of clicks your Bitly links receive.

Optimizing your future tweets and expanding your reach

Using this tool you can see which of your tweets gain the most replies, retweets and favourites and use this information when creating tweets in the future to make sure you improve their effectiveness. Every time your tweet is retweeted your potential reach increases, you can see your potential audience for each tweet using "Tweets Analytics".

To increase your reach, you can monitor which types of tweets gain the most retweets and post more like these in the future. To check if your reach is increasing you can monitor your Amplification Rate, which, according to Avinash Kaushik, is how much your audience values your content enough to share it with their own Twitter communities. If you keep tweeting more useful and valuable content, your number of retweets will increase and so will your Amplification Rate and possibly your number of followers.

Check you are achieving some of your SMART objectives

The “Tweet Analytics” tool can be especially useful for enabling you to check that you are meeting some of your SMART objectives. For example:

If you are trying to be more active on Twitter, you could have set a target for the amount of tweets you want to send out each week. Your “My actions” table shows you how many tweets you have sent out as well as how many tweets you have retweeted and favourited in your desired time scale.
If one of your goals was to spread your reach or increase your influence, you could have set a target to achieve a specific amount of retweets or favorites per week.
If one of your objectives is to add value to your followers, you can use Avinash Kaushik’s social media metrics to check that your Applause Rate, which is the average number of favourites you receive per every tweet you send, is increasing. Your Applause Rate shows if you have a deep understanding of your community and are providing content they find valuable enough to add to their own Twitter profiles.

Take care of your supporters and improve your CRM

Using this new feature you can directly see the replies, favourites and retweets each tweet receives. From here you can select individuals and click to see their profiles, follow them, add them to list or add a tag or note to their profile to keep track of users to come back to in the future.

Just like in the “I influence” panel, you can also directly reply to questions improving your responsiveness and CRM and can use the calendar to filter back to see tweets from a specific time period. You can also use “Tweet Analytics” to easily thank people for retweets including the ability to reply to multiple users at once.

Understanding Avinash’s metrics

We have integrated Avinash Kaushik’s social media metrics into the “Tweets Analytics” tool in order to help you analyze the success of the content you are posting on Twitter. As Avinash explains these are "simple measures that get you to focus on the right things from a social media participation perspective, help you understand how well you are doing at it, and quantify the business impact."

Conversation Rate

Avinash says that social media enables us to “get a very good sense for who is following / friending / subscribing to us. We can measure if what we are saying connects to them (in near real time!). And unlike all others, this channel has the word social in it! Social as in talk and listen and discuss.”

Conversion Rate is measured by dividing the number of replies you receive by the number of tweets you post. If you understand your audience and what you are tweeting connects to them, you will have a high Conversion Rate due to having “meaningful conversations with your audience” and therefore your tweets will receive a high number of replies.

Amplification Rate

Avinash describes one advantage of social media being the ability to overcome limitations concerning reach with traditional marketing channels: “not only do you have a network, but every node in your network has a network of its own! If you follow my advice and post something ‘incredible, relevant, of value’ to your audience then they can allow you to break free of the limitations of your network and spread your word around to a more massive audience!”

It is calculated by dividing the number of retweets you receive by the number of tweets you post. If you have a high Amplification Rate it means that you are posting content that your community finds valuable and therefore wants to share it with their own community, increasing your reach.

Avinash suggests “as you post and tweet and you rock and you roll… measure what pieces of content (type) cause amplification (allow your social contributions to spread to your 2nd, or even 3rd, level network). Then do more of the type that increase amplification. You'll get more sharing and spreading of your content. But this is very, very important: You'll be giving your audience content they consider to be of such incredible value that they want to share it (and hence you'll know what your audience wants / loves).”

Applause Rate

Applause Rate measures that you have a deep understanding of what your audience likes. It is measured by dividing the number of favourites you receive by the number of tweets you send.

When a user favourites your tweet it is stored in their “favourites” section of their profile for others to see. You can achieve a high Applause Rate by posting content that your audience will enjoy, not by just using Twitter to promote your brand.

7 ways your business can gain more followers on Twitter... the right way!

2013-05-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

As we’ve always stressed in the past, the quality of your Twitter community is much more important than the numbers. However, the more followers you have, the larger your reach is and ultimately the more leads you can create. For this reason you need to have strategies in place to encourage users to follow you.

There are right ways and wrong ways to grow your Twitter community; please don’t be tempted to buy followers (never!) or mass follow users to try to gain followers in return. You need to grow your following “organically”, which takes time but means you will have a high quality community formed of users who are interested in you and your brand, want to hear what you have to say and ultimately can be turned into leads.

Here are some tips on how SocialBro can help you to build a high quality following:

1. As well as describing who you or your business are, make sure your bio and tweets contain keywords relevant to your business so that when people search for them, your Twitter profile and tweets are returned. There are a number of ways SocialBro can help you find keywords to put in your bio:

Use your Bio TagClouds to see what is important to your followers and friends and therefore what they may be searching for in Twitter.
Use The “Analyze your competitors” tool to find out what is important to their community and use this information for your own strategy.

Tip: We also recommend including your location so that users know where to find you or in which country you are based and a link to your website or blog, so that users can find out more information about you and from here can become customers or clients.

2. Perform Twitter searches to find people talking about subjects related to your business and reply to them with recommendations or answers to any questions they are asking. Make sure you don’t just use this as an opportunity to promote yourself, offer recommendations from third parties, for example a useful article you have come across.

Use the “Monitor a Hashtag” tool in SocialBro and select “Twitter search” as the source to search for people talking about keywords specific to your industry.

3. Analyze your competitors’ Twitter accounts to find users to target. Your competitor’s followers have an interest in their products and services and therefore may have an interest in yours as well. Filtering amongst them and following selected ones can enable you to find potential customers.

4. Retweet users who you are following or congratulate them when they are celebrating something to grab their attention.

The advanced search and filter functions provided by SocialBro enable you to find influential people with specific keywords in their bios or from a particular location to follow and engage with.
You can then use SocialBro to create a list to monitor your influential or famous friends in your favourite client, such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, and look for opportunities to engage with them.

5. Create interesting or useful tweets that people will read and share. You can alternate between tweets based on 3rd party content and tweets about your brand. It is good practice to offer tips and educational content as well as information about products and offers. Asking questions and starting discussions encourages users to engage with you and increases your reach.

Use Bio Tagclouds to see what your followers are currently posting about to gain ideas for engagement.
Monitor your lists to see what influential people, your competitors, etc. are currently tweeting about and to look for trending hashtags you could use in your tweets.
Look out for articles and blog posts you think your followers will find useful and tweet them at optimum times to gain retweets.

9 Tools to Improve Social Media Productivity bit.ly/ZHagLV via @jaybaer
— SocialBro App (@SocialBro) April 16, 2013

Best Time to Tweet report

With SocialBro you can create custom Best Time to Tweet reports to segment your community and make sure each piece of content is posted when the right audience is online, e.g. if you have communities located in different countries.
You can schedule your tweets in advance using Hootsuite! Use your Best Time to Tweet report to show you your optimal times to tweet and create them in advance, saving you time.
You can also use SocialBro’s integration with Bufferapp to schedule content from the web you wish to tweet about at optimal times!

7. Make use of follow and share buttons to encourage people who read your content, e.g. blog posts or look at products on your site, to become followers and share them via Twitter and other social media networks, expanding your reach and generating traffic to your website or blog.

You can use SocialBro to monitor a URL to see who has shared your blog post or pages from your website and view stats about the users these interest. You can then use this information for ideas on who you should be targeting in Twitter.

Introducing SocialBro’s Affiliate and Partnership Programs!

2013-05-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Today we’re releasing our brand new Affiliate and Partnership programs! If you love SocialBro, why not earn commissions from spreading the word about SocialBro Pro and encouraging others to start using it too? :-)

Since starting over a year ago, our Pro cloud version has grown massively with the support from all our customers, many of whom have recommended us to friends, colleagues and clients. In January, we celebrated reaching 1000 paid subscribers, something that we were very proud of. To help us grow further, we are looking for Affiliates and Partners to monetize from promoting SocialBro.

If you have improved the way you use Twitter for Business by using our platform and have achieved various Twitter marketing objectives, you may be interested in one of these programs.

Turn your SocialBro Promotion into Profits

With SocialBro’s Affiliate and Partnership programs, you can earn profits from encouraging others to sign up to SocialBro Pro and discover the benefits of its features for themselves. After joining we will provide you with unique share links to send out to potential customers and affiliates will be given a variety of cool banners to place on your website or blog to advertise SocialBro. You will then earn commission for every person who signs up as a result of your promotion.

As an Affiliate or Partner you will have access to your own complete dashboard to control your activities by tracking the clicks your link has received and viewing stats about your progress. From here you can also track your earnings so far and share your link via social networks.

How the Programs Work

Affiliate Program

SocialBro Affiliates will receive 100% of the first month of a user’s subscription, for example if someone signs up for a Business account, you will receive $149.00.
If the person signs up at a discounted price using a coupon, you will still receive their first month’s subscription but at the price they paid not the monthly prices stated on our website.
You will receive your earnings monthly on the 5th day of every month and the payout will occur when you have earned a minimum of $50.
If you refer someone who signs up for an annual plan you will receive the total amount paid divided by 12.

I want to be an Affilate!

Partnership Program

This program is particularly suitable for agencies who want to integrate SocialBro into their clients’ social media strategies. Partners will receive monthly revenue from all of the payments SocialBro receives from the users they sign up.
If you encourage your clients to sign up for SocialBro Pro, you will receive a percentage of each month’s payment for the lifetime of their subscription.

I want to be a SocialBro partner!

.@IanCleary shares how his blog became one of the top 10 Social Media Examiner blogs of 2013 & other tips

2013-04-24T04:42:00.000-07:00

“Be yourself. Too many people lose their personality when they go online and become boring. Build relationships not followers!”, says Ian Cleary, an entrepreneur with a strong passion for Social Media tools and technology and founder of the award winning blog RazorSocial.com. He has been working in the technology market for over 20 years and in Social Media for five, and this year was awarded one of the top 10 social media blogs for 2013 by Social Media Examiner!

You’ve had a very successful career in Social Media, what would you say has been the highlight so far?

The highlight was winning the Social Media Examiner Top 10 blog awards. I admire Mike Stelzner and his team for what they have achieved and we were in very good company with previous winners (Heidicohen.com, Convinceandconvert.com, Jeffbullas.com etc). Our blog ( RazorSocial.com) was only 6 months old when we won and we were competing with very established blogs so it
was great to win.

Why and how did razorsocial.com win Social Media Examiner’s top 10 blogs award?

We won in the Social Media Examiner top 10 blog awards because we write high quality content, have built up a very strong community in a short time and identified a niche that makes us different than any other blog out there.

Which aspect of your work would you say you enjoyed the most?

Strange as it may seem the aspect I most enjoy is going to social media conferences. I love the challenge of growing our blog, revenue and influence and I love networking online but meeting
people at the events is fantastic.

I’m just back from Social Slam in Knoxsville and Social Media Marketing World in San Diego and met so many fantastic people. Speaking at Social Slam was the highlight of my year as I admire Mark Schaefer so much.

What made you decide to start a blog about Social Media tools?

We were building Facebook Competition applications and were making money in Ireland doing this but there was too much competition internationally. Also we were not passionate about the apps we were building. We didn’t have a magic idea so we decided to build up a global network around the areas we are passionate about, tools and technology. We love figuring out the best way to use tools to develop business and love sharing this information.

What would you say are the most useful Twitter tools for businesses on the market?

When we write about tools we generally recommend HootSuite, SocialBro, ManageFlitter and NeedTagger.

What advice would you give to businesses starting out on Twitter?

The most important piece of advice is to be yourself. Too many people loose their personality when they go online and become boring! Build relationships not followers!

What are your predictions for the future of Social Media?

Social Media will continue to evolve at a very fast pace as the whole web becomes social. Social search will become increasingly important as both Google and Facebook strive to own it.

New platforms will appear and some existing platforms will not be in existence. The key for business is to have a clear strategy and a loyal following and don't assume that Facebook, Twitter etc will always be here. There’s no guarantees in the world of social media.

In your opinion what would you say is the most useful feature of SocialBro?

I love being able to use the very advanced filters which enable me to find really relevant people to engage with. I can narrow down searches to find people based on their influence score, Twitter following, tweets per day and much more. With Twitter when you are building up your following you need to be selective and this feature really helps you identify the most relevant followers.

Compare up to three Twitter accounts at the same time with SocialBro’s new tool

2013-04-16T08:00:00.002-07:00

One of SocialBro’s most useful tools has always been the ability to analyze a competitor’s Twitter account to gain stats and insights about the members who make up its community. Now with our new tool “Accounts Comparison” you can directly compare your stats against those of up to 2 competitors on the same charts!

This feature is perfect for assessing how you are performing in Twitter compared to your competitors or any Twitter account. It’s also especially useful for agencies who wish to compare their clients’ accounts against others to gain ideas for creating their marketing strategies.

Report

In the Accounts Comparison report you will be able to visualize all of the charts that are available in the Insights Report, such as languages, locations, charts indicating how active your followers are and charts indicating the quality of your communities. As well as this you can also see the interests of all 3 communities displayed in bio TagClouds.

We have also created charts comparing the size of your communities including the number of followers, friends and the total number of members in your communities and a separate chart showing you the number of duplicate members that exist between the 3 accounts.

We believe these stats will enable you alter and improve your Twitter marketing strategies when it comes to targeting potential customers and engaging with Twitter users.

For information on how to use the "Accounts Comparison" tool, please see our user guide.

Introducing our new resources page!

2013-04-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

We here at SocialBro are committed to making sure that you achieve the best results possible from using our platform. That’s why we have created a new resources page, packed with ideas, tips and walkthroughs to help you use all of the tools and functions of SocialBro. Each of the sections cover all of our features and tools and will be constantly updated, so no matter what your strategy is, there will be some material here to help you achieve it!

Case Studies

We have created 5 real life case studies demonstrating the value companies and agencies have achieved from using SocialBro, and we plan on adding more in the future. These case studies are designed to show you how similar businesses to your own use our platform towards achieving their various Twitter marketing objectives.

Topics covered include using SocialBro to:

Connect with influential people in your industry
Build up high quality online relationships
Target and engage with potential customers
Help a community manager perform her daily tasks

Above you can see an example of one of our case studies belonging to online marketing agency Blueclaw, who use SocialBro to learn who makes up their clients’ Twitter communities.

Blueclaw are an online marketing agency who have been leaders in online marketing for nearly a decade. Using SocialBro they are able to track their clients’ community growth and gain in-depth stats about the users who make up these communities. They make use of the various search and filter options, insights and the ability to analyze their competitors’ communities to increase sales for their clients.

In this case study, find out how SocialBro helps Blueclaw understand their clients’ Twitter audience and enables them to make decisions on how best to target and engage with them.

Practical Examples

We have written a series of practical examples showing how you can use SocialBro for different areas of your business, e.g. events, CRM, targeting and engaging users, analyzing competitors Twitter strategies etc. Each of these contains a step by step guide of how to use the features and tools required to reach specific goals you might have.

Webinars

In our new resources page you can also find information and links to the webinars we will be holding over the next few months. These include repeats of our “Getting started with SocialBro” webinar, which covers all of the main tools of SocialBro (it’s also held in Spanish).

We are also running “SocialBro Workshops”, which are mini 20 minute lessons teaching you how to use a certain feature in depth, the next of which is being held on April the 24th at 5:30pm GMT and will cover how to create a Best Time to Tweet report to optimize your tweets. Topics included in our upcoming workshops include creating a Best Time to Tweet report, insights in SocialBro, discovering Twitter users and how to improve your CRM. You can sign up for any of our webinars from this page.

Introducing new actionable stats and other features

2013-04-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

We’ve been busy here at our HQ, creating new tools to make your SocialBro experience better. We’ve made improvements to the way you target, manage and analyze your community and sources in the following ways:

New actionable stats and new filters

We have improved our Insights Report to create actionable stats as many of you requested! Now as well as seeing numbers, you can click on any section of a chart to view the profiles of the users that the stat applies to, e.g. see all of your followers who speak Spanish, who have between 100 and 500 followers or those who tweeted in the last 24 hours. This saves you from having to use the filters to find out who the users are behind the graphs as you can now see them straight from the Insights Report with one click!

There are now also two new extremely useful stats in the Insights Report. The first of these is a chart showing you which percentage of your community is male and female. You can click on either section of the chart to target just male or female members of your community, for example if you want to target both genders separately you can create custom Best Time to Tweet report for each.

Your location map (as you can see above) has been improved to make the results more accurate and now, as with Bio TagClouds, you can click a specific country’s tagcloud to see the profiles of the members of your community that are from there. This is helpful when it comes to targeting, tailoring engagement or sending users a DM using one of our newest tools “Twitter DM Campaigns”.

We have also created two new filters using our new stats which are Gender and Country, improving how you can target users from your community or any source such as a competitor’s account, a list, the whole of Twitter etc.

Whitelist and Blacklist

When using Twitter as a business tool, who you are following (your friends) is extremely important as they will be made up of clients, customers, influential people, thought leaders etc. Although following users seems simple, it’s very important to follow the right people when building up a high quality Twitter community. Following the appropriate users helps build up a relationship that could be damaged by a number of things, one of which being accidently unfollowing them.

When unfollowing a large amount of people at once you could select one of these important friends by mistake. Now with SocialBro’s “Whitelist” feature, you can protect these important members of your community by adding them to your whitelist so that they cannot be unfollowed accidently.

The “Blacklist” is similar: it prevents you from following users who you do not wish to, such as those you have already unfollowed or those users who have automatically followed then unfollowed you.

See how to use the “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” features in our user guide.

Sort by follow date

We have now added two new ways of putting your followers and friends in order, which are by the date they followed you and the date you followed them. These are useful when browsing your contacts for example to find your first followers to target with a specific campaign or when looking to clean up your community by unfollowing those you followed when you first joined Twitter but have not interacted with.

Please note: these new features are only available to SocialBro Pro users.

We hope that you love these new features as much as we do! If you have any doubts or questions we’d be thrilled to help! Feel free to tweet us “@SocialBro”.

The power of using Twitter as a CRM tool

2013-03-27T10:14:00.001-07:00

Twitter provides your businesses with a great way of interacting with your customers and fans as it enables you to hear what they are saying about you, answer their questions and solve any problems they are having in real-time. This awesome platform has introduced a new way of using CRM techniques that you can’t ignore. Ultimately Twitter allows you to build up customer loyalty!

Managing your Twitter presence effectively will not only increase your following and help you engage with your community but also provides you with the opportunity to turn these followers into customers.

Listed below are some tips on how you can use Twitter and SocialBro to improve the relationship you have with your potential clients, fans and customers.

Answer questions from customers

Having an active Twitter account means that you are open to answer questions from customers and are therefore able to use Twitter to provide customer service, an opportunity which cannot be missed. Asking a question in 140 characters is a lot quicker and easier than sending you an email or phoning your offices. This can increase sales as if customers have a doubt or a question, they will ask you on Twitter whereas they may not bother with the other two channels.

Make sure you answer customers’ questions with solutions, suggestions or links to your website, user guide, blogs as soon as possible as they will expect an instant response.

@afraser_nuim You can follow this link on reading the date code on your Dell laptop battery: bit.ly/15RknPT ^GP #DellListens
— Dell Cares PRO (@DellCaresPRO) March 26, 2013

Turn complaints into customer satisfaction

Twitter is a good way of having people talk about your brand and products, therefore increasing awareness and potentially customers. On the reverse side of this is the ability for customers to publicly complain about you when things go wrong. This does however mean that you have the opportunity to reply to people who have complaints about your brand.

If you deal with these in a way that solves the problem and brings the user benefits, you can end up with a satisfied customer who will then tweet good things about you and your customer service.

It's so refreshing to work with companies with great customer service - thanks @amazon! You're a lifesaver!
— Matt Alex (@MAlexOnTheGo) March 25, 2013

Keep customers updated

Twitter can be used to make customers aware of any problems you might be having with your services or website. Keeping them informed will help the situation by preventing confusion and a mass of questions being directed at you. Similarly you can also keep them updated on things out of your control that are related to your daily operations, e.g. transport or another website.

Severe weather causing disruption to flights in the UK and Europe. For more information see bit.ly/93VvFx or call 0800 727 800.
— British Airways (@British_Airways) March 23, 2013

Thank customers

Twitter can be used as a way of thanking customers or followers for their contribution to your success. It is an easy way of expressing your gratitude and helping create customer loyalty. You should be monitoring your Twitter presence using a Twitter client of your choice e.g. Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to find individual users praising your products or service and send them a reply saying thank you or retweet their post.

Thanks to all of our fans who nominated us for @citysearchnyc's Best Cupcake Shop! You're so sweet! citysearch.com/best/newyork/r…
— Magnolia Bakery (@magnoliabakery) March 13, 2013

Welcome new followers

When starting out, it can be beneficial to send a personal welcome message to new followers. This shows them your appreciation and can start to build up a relationship between the two of you. This is particularly useful if you are a small business that provides a personalized service. SocialBro makes it really easy to do this as your new followers are clearly shown on your dashboard.

Categorize and organize your community

SocialBro provides you with an easy way of categorizing and organizing your community in the form of notes and tags. For example if customers have a problem or complaint that will take some time to see to, you could add a tag to their profile to remember to come back to them. You can use notes to write about the problems in detail and also assign tags to users who may be interested in new versions of products that will be ready to release soon.

Another use for notes and tags is to classify users into groups for example customers, bloggers, journalists, etc. which saves you from having to perform a search more than once. This works in a similar way to a Twitter list but there is no limit on the number of users you can add a tag to.

A tip here is to create a Best Time to Tweet Report for the users with this tag e.g. to know when you should post tweets aimed at customers, bloggers or other users.

Keep track of your interactions

SocialBro can be used to view all of your latest interactions and from here you can reply, retweet or favourite tweets. It is important to reply to customers as quickly as possible in order to create customer satisfaction.

There is also a section on the dashboard titled “I influence” which shows all of the people who have recently mentioned or retweeted you. Clicking the blue corner of a user’s profile shows you all of the interaction you have had with that user meaning that you can always look back to see what you have told them in the past. This information is available for any user not just those in the “I influence” section and you can use the calendar to go back to interactions from any time period, e.g. the past year, December 2012 etc.

Get to know your new followers

The SocialBro dashboard clearly displays your new followers, handy for sending out welcome messages or following back. SocialBro gives you the ability to follow multiple users at once. You can also use the calendar to filter by date, for example if you are away for a few days you can see who followed you while you were away.

Don't forget to follow your important followers

Similarly as above, you can also see who follows you who you do not follow back. You can use the search and filter options to see if any of these users are ones who you should be following, such as the important people from your industry and your customers. Remember there are some conversations that you will wish to have in private (e.g. dealing with complaints) but users can only send you a Direct Message (DM) if you are following them.

Save your Contacts

Although Twitter allows you to import contacts from your email accounts, SocialBro gives you the ability to import contacts from a text file. For example if you have gathered a list of customers’ Twitter handles or a list of people who have subscribed to your website you could import them using SocialBro to follow, add them to a list, tag or tweet them and ultimately manage the relationship you have with these users in the right way.

Remember if you don’t wish to follow someone but want to be able to easily find them again in the future you can add a tag or note to their profile, which allows you to locate them with one click in the future. Another example of how this feature could be useful is if you have recently hosted an event and will wish to invite the attendees to a future event you can import the users and then create a list or a tag to organize and ultimately store their profiles in your own database.

Tips on how to use Twitter for Business and other insights by @WarrenWhitlock

2013-03-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

If you're using Twitter for business or to brand yourself, Warren Whitlock's advice to you is: “Look for thought leaders, current customers, and competitors in your market that are using Twitter. Listen to them".

Whitlock, a digital business development strategist and author of best selling books about Twitter and Social Media, suggests that if you really listen to these people "you’ll get to know their hopes and dreams… Maybe their hopes and dreams surround your product".

In this interview we ask him about his background in Social Media and for some tips and thoughts that he could share with our readers. "The revolution in Marketing and Business is just getting started”.

You are a man of many talents (author, speaker, social media expert, radio host etc)! Which aspect of your work do you enjoy the most?

Thank you. I believe that we all have many capabilities and learning new skills and applying them is always fun, perhaps what I enjoy most. I believe the essence of life is our connections with people and the stories we share. I think I do that in every activity, or at least think about it. I say, if you can tell the difference between work and play you want doing one of them right. I enjoy it all.

What were your goals when you started working in Social Media?

Most of what’s called social media today is either media (about 1% of its capability) or what I would say is business the way it should be done.

We all want to do business with people that we know, like, and trust. The tools of the 20th century allowed us to push a message in one direction. Today new tools are catching up with the promise of one-on-one conversations with many, many more people.

My goal has been, and will always be, to connect with individuals. The tools called social media allow us to do more of that.

What would you say your greatest business achievement has been to date?

Becoming unemployable.

Please explain?

We are all working for ourselves. Choosing to give our lives over to a company is foolish. We need some employees, but anyone who I can convince to take control of their own destiny is my goal now :)

Do you use any Social Media tools? Which three would you recommend to businesses and why?

I use most of the tools that come out. Once I became known as the guy who wrote the first book about Twitter, marketers assume I know a little bit. Every day I use twitter.com, Tweetie on my iPhone and iPad and several others. I recommend that everyone try a few and decide what works best for themselves.

You wrote your first book about Twitter in 2008 (Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online). How do you think the way businesses use Twitter has changed since then?

There’s more people using it now. The revolution in marketing and business is still just getting started. Each new user brings the training and life experience they had… Most of us were trained in the mass century to push out a message wherever we can… So we go through three phases as we learn this new technology.

#1) “who cares what somebody else had for breakfast?”(It can’t possibly work, it’s a waste of time)

#2) “how does one monetize this?” (looking for some way to treat it like the old media we know)

#3) “how do I live without this?” (It becomes a won’t we use to communicate)

Once a user gets to phase 3 they stop trying to push a message and learn to listen and
respond to human beings as people.

What would you say is the most common mistake businesses make when using Twitter? What are your predictions for it’s future?

Attempting to use it as a broadcast medium. The important follower number is 1. The one person you’re talking to at the moment. Twitter is currently growing at something like 1 million users a day, regardless of the fad aspect of it, people will be using it for one-to-one conversation for many years to come.

As a user of SocialBro, what would you say is its most useful feature? :)

The ability to drill down and find the influencers to engage with and serve so that they can amplify your listening in the market.

Segment your DMs and measure their effectiveness with SocialBro’s new tool Twitter DM Campaigns

2013-03-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Direct messages (DMs) are a great way of communicating with your followers as they allow you to send private content to users, which can improve the quality of the conversation between you. Many people and businesses, however, use this resource in a bad way by spamming their followers with repetitive and automated content that they have no interest in. With SocialBro, you can now send out DMs the right way by segmenting the audience who will receive them and measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns!

“Twitter DM Campaigns” allows you to send out personalized DMs to a custom sample of your followers, making sure your messages are targeted at the right people, saving your time and ensuring you are not sending out messages to those who will have no interest in them. SocialBro has also integrated Bitly into this tool allowing you to monitor the progress of your campaigns.

This new tool can be used for a variety of reasons including:

Inviting past attendees to events/ webinars
Offering current customers a promotion
PR purposes

How “Twitter DM Campaigns” works

Use SocialBro’s search and filter options to segment the group of followers you wish to target e.g. by location, industry, influence, type of customer etc. and then send them a personalized 140 character DM. Using SocialBro you can insert their name or username into the message and you can add a link e.g. to a landing page where they can sign up for an event or redeem a coupon code.

We have integrated this tool with Bitly, enabling you to view stats about your campaign and track its progress. These stats include the percentage completion of your campaign, including number of DMs sent and number of links clicked broken down by date, the location of users who have clicked your link and where the user accessed your DM campaign e.g. Hootsuite, Twitter.com etc.

We have created a set of best practices to advise you on how to use this tool the right way, as anyone accused of spamming users will not only lose followers but their Twitter account will be suspended. This tool is currently available to users with a Professional or a Business account, however other users can add this tool to their plan for an extra charge.

Please see our user guide and practical examples for instructions on using this tool.

Take a look at our quick video tutorial at the top of this post:

"Don’t obsess over conversing. Build reach with interesting content". An exclusive interview with @danzarrella

2013-03-05T04:41:00.000-08:00

“I love taking hard data and making it fun and understandable for audiences” says Dan Zarella, Hubspot’s Social media Scientist, author and speaker. In this exclusive interview for SocialBro’s blog, Zarella tells us how he began working in Social Media (“I started doing what we called ‘link baiting’”) and his goals when he first started out.

Zarella, known for his studies including “The Science of Retweets”, which has been his most widely cited, reveals that speaking to groups about his research is one of the best parts of his work and that he sees himself as a storyteller: “Speaking to groups is a blast for me”.

In this quick interview the author suggests that with very few exceptions all businesses (especially small, local ones) should be using Twitter as part of their marketing strategies. We decided to ask Dan some questions to provide our readers with an insight into his background and some Social Media tips.

Tell us about the beginning of your career in Social Media?

>>I was an SEO, way back in 2004 or so. And getting links for clients was always the hardest part of my job. So I started using Digg, doing what we called "link baiting" back then. When Twitter launched, I joined just to promote stories on Digg, but quickly recognized it's power beyond that.

What were your goals when you first started working in Social Media, did you have any idea how big you would become?

>>My goal was to move the industry forward. I'm a geek and I was dismayed by the lack of real data and science about Social Media Marketing. So I focused my work on that. I'm not sure I'd define myself as "big" but I did believe that there was a need for the information I was producing. I'm just glad that so many people have found it valuable.

What would you say your greatest business achievement has been to date?

>>Probably my Guinness World Record. In August of 2011, we held the biggest webinar ever "The Science of Social Media", with more than 30,000 registrants and 11,000 attendees.

What makes you decide to follow someone on Twitter?

>>If I think they're going to be tweeting interesting things, especially if I know their name from somewhere else, a book or a blog.

What would you say is the biggest mistake businesses make on Twitter? What advice would you give to those starting out?

>>Thinking that "the conversation" is the most important part. Don’t obsess over conversing, it doesn't do much to build reach. It's posting interesting content that does. Share tons and tons of interesting links.

How would you say Twitter has changed marketing?

>>It has sped it up to a pace where it's all happening in nearly real time now. It's also humanized it quite a bit, we get to see big brands make all-too-normal-person errors.

And finally as a user of SocialBro, what would you say is its most useful feature? :-)

>>I used SocialBro to make a list of the most followed (famous) accounts that follow me. I call this list "Talk To" and I'm able to use it to make friends with some of these folks.

Dan’s upcoming book “The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies” is available to preorder from amazon now!

New tool: Easily benchmark the evolution of your Twitter account with your industry peers

2013-02-27T07:59:00.000-08:00

Here you can find the blog post about our newest tool "Twitter DM campaigns" which was launched today!

Wondering if your Twitter practices are progressing at the rate they should be? Or if your number of followers and your influence score are similar to accounts with characteristics matching your own? Today we’re introducing our new tool “Benchmark”, which basically helps you analyze your Twitter account by comparing it with your industry peers.

Comparing stats with a competitor is one thing, but they could well be a larger corporation or could have been using Twitter for a much longer time than yourself, and we all know it takes time to build up a Twitter community and presence. That’s why “Benchmark” compares the numbers of your community with those of similar age and size. This tool is available to any of our SocialBro Pro users.

Followers, friends, tweets and lists

We’ve created clusters of Twitter accounts out of our database of 100M active users and grouped these by the age of their account, the number of followers and the topics they are related to. We then clearly display the growth of your account in number of followers, friends, tweets and lists and the average of similar users on a graph for you to analyze.

For example if you are an insurance company your Twitter account will be compared to other accounts who fit into the “Business and Finance” category, who are of a similar age and have a similar number of followers. This tool is designed to give you a rough idea of how you are performing in Twitter compared to others.

As well as the growth we also show you the difference in influence according the Kred and the Peerindex score between your Twitter account and those that are similar. Kred for example measures influence by assessing how frequently you are retweeted, replied, mentioned and followed on Twitter. Using Benchmark you can compare your score to your peers’ and if you discover yours is lower than the average you can work on trying to gain more replies and retweets to improve it.

Please see our user guide for more details on how to use this feature.

We hope you find our new tool useful!

Using Twitter for Business? Listening and engaging are crucial!

2013-02-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

We want all of our SocialBro users to gain the maximum value possible when using Twitter for their businesses. Thats why we’re starting our new “How to series” of blog posts. This is the first in the series, we hope you find it helpful!

When starting out on Twitter it can be tempting to follow as many people as possible and try to promote your brand by sending them tweets and direct messages. This approach will not get you very far! Why not? Because the people you are promoting to don’t know you and your business meaning you're just another person trying to sell them things they don’t think they need.

The first thing you need to remember is to make sure you are targeting and following the right people e.g. people in your industry, influential people, potential customers. For those Twitter users who already know who you are e.g. existing clients, bloggers who have mentioned you or users tweeting about your brand, it is fine to follow and engage with them straight away. These users have an interest in your brand or find you interesting so they will reciprocate the follow and engage with you. For those users who don’t know you we have a suggestion...

As Twitter is a place for engaging with people and building up relationships, you need to take the time to get to know people before selling them your services. That’s why we suggest that it’s more effective to monitor and listen to users who are unaware of your brand before engaging with them. You can then look out for chances to interact with them allowing you to build up a positive reputation for example becoming known for being helpful or interesting.

When you come to promoting your business and services people will know you for being an expert in your field and will be more likely to trust what you are saying and therefore more likely to turn into customers.

Using Twitter lists

So how can you begin to network with users and build up connections beyond just following them? We suggest creating Twitter lists (or subscribing to existing ones), which allow you to monitor users’ tweets and look for opportunities to engage with them.

A Twitter list is described by Twitter as “a curated group of Twitter users”. A list enables you to view what users are tweeting without having to follow them, for example to monitor competition. Another and probably the most important use of lists is to keep track of the important people you wish to engage with. Once you are following potential clients or influential people you can use a list to monitor their tweets rather than scrolling through hundreds of tweets on your timeline.

You can create lists directly in Twitter but doing this via SocialBro will save you a lot of time :-)

Firstly you need to decide who you want to monitor and interact with for example: potential customers, influential people, journalists that cover your industry etc.

1. Select one of the following:

“Discover Twitter users” from the toolbar
Your Community from the Global stats panel
“Analyze your competitors” from the toolbar (and add a competitor as a source)

and perform a search to find your desired users e.g. influential people working in Social Media or perform a search within yours or a competitor’s community.

2. Select which users you wish to add to your list from the search results. You can drag and drop a box to select multiple users and you can change how many users are displayed on your page in your Settings.

3. Select “Add to a list all the selected users” from the bottom navigation bar (pictured below).

4. Choose a name and description and if using the list for monitoring purposes it is advised to make the list private. If you create a public list, those in the list will be notified.

5. Once you have saved the list you can add users via future SocialBro searches or the person icon on user’s profiles.

Alternatively you can subscribe to lists that have been created by others e.g. competitors or thought leaders in your field by selecting “lists” when on their profile. You can now monitor what your chosen users are saying by adding the list as a column in your favourite Twitter client e.g. HootSuite or Tweetdeck. This gives you opportunities to engage with them for example commenting on their tweets with recommendations, links to blog posts or other helpful content allowing you to become recognisable to your community.

Users may also follow you first after you engage with them and retweeting and favoriting their tweets can also gain you followers as it shows you are interested in what they have to say. After you have listened and engaged with users you can gradually over time start talking about your business and services.

Don’t forget once you have created a list you can view detailed stats and insights about it’s members, just select “Analyze your lists” from the toolbar.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxanaart/5359616063/

64 people tuned into our first webinar

2013-02-13T04:27:00.000-08:00

On Monday the 11th of February our CEO, Javier Burón, hosted SocialBro’s first ever webinar! 64 people tuned into the webinar titled "Getting started with SocialBro" to learn how to better analyze, target, segment and engage with their Twitter communities.

For those of you who took part we hope you found it useful! For those who missed out don’t worry Javier will be presenting the webinar again over the next three weeks.

Some of the main topics covered in the webinar are:

An explanation of how to navigate around the dashboard and the different menus
How to search and filter for specific users
What the insights tell you about your Twitter community
How to discover the interests of your Twitter community
How to create lists, tags and notes
How to analyze a competitor’s Twitter account
How to monitor a hashtag, keyword or URL
How to create a Best Time to Tweet Report

The next "Getting started with SocialBro" webinar will be held on Monday 18th February at 5.30pm GMT. Sign up for the SocialBro webinars.

SocialBro launches new Tool...... Collaborators!

2013-02-06T07:23:00.001-08:00

We here at SocialBro HQ are very excited to announce our latest good news to you all! We would like to introduce you to our latest new feature “Collaborators!”. This feature has been added to make managing your Twitter accounts easier. It is very rare that an organisation will have just one person (or even a few people) managing their whole social media strategy.

With SocialBro’s new Collaborators Tool you can control which members of your company can see certain Twitter accounts, such as your co-workers, or use this feature to enable your clients to manage their Twitter accounts but not see those not belonging to them.

Being able to control who has permission to access what will allow you to maintain control over your accounts while sharing the responsibility with others. This will ultimately save you time, make managing your Twitter- marketing strategy easier and prevent publishing mistakes from happening.

Please find on our user guide the tutorial How to use the Collaborators Tool, where we explain all the details about the new feature.

Professional users can add up to 3 collaborators to their SocialBro account at no extra cost.
Business users can add up to 5 collaborators to their SocialBro account at no extra cost.

Changes to the number of sources you can analyze

We have also decided to bring you some extra positive changes to your SocialBro Pro accounts to make you happier with our software! We have now made the following changes to some of the SocialBro plans:

We are aware that one of the most useful features of SocialBro is the ability to analyze sources (competitor’s Twitter communities, lists, searches and hashtags) to enable you to better target and engage with Twitter users. We have therefore removed the limit on the number of sources you can analyze so those of you using the Premium, Premium Plus, Professional and Business plans can now analyze as many sources as you like!

Our pro users can now take advantage of being able to analyze:

As many of your competitor’s Twitter communities as you like: use this as an opportunity to find new potential customers or gain an insight into their Twitter marketing strategies.
As many hashtags as you like e.g. find out who is talking about an event you are holding, use a hashtag to monitor a promotion you are running or find new topics to better engage with your target market.
As many Twitter searches as you like: find out who is tweeting about your product or who is looking for a certain service in a desired location (make use of our geolocation feature!).
As many lists as you like: useful if you hold events and want to keep the attendees’ details for future use, if you have lists of different groups of customers, if you want to analyze public lists etc.

Remember the number of people using Twitter increases every day and in order to reach them effectively you need to be finding out who the people are behind the stats and how best to engage with them, so the more sources you analyse the better!

Don’t forget that to take advantage of these changes you have to be using one of our Pro plans, so if you haven't already upgraded theres no better time to do so!

Warning to all Adobe Air desktop users

2013-02-05T03:43:00.000-08:00

[aquí puedes ver la versión en español]

We here at SocialBro don’t want any of our users to experience problems whilst using our software. That’s why we are warning all of our Adobe Air desktop users that you are at risk of losing your data.

Unfortunately this is something that is out of our control as it is a result of a bug from Adobe Air and whilst we have waited over a year for a solution we have decided that the best thing to do is to ask all of these desktop users to export your data to either the Chrome app or to a SocialBro Pro plan.

Both of these will ensure that your data will be safe from being lost. We also have to make you aware that as a result of this the desktop version of SocialBro will only be supported until the 28th February. We’re sorry if this causes any inconvenience to any of our users but remember that SocialBro Pro brings you many advantages over the desktop version, including access from any computer, the ability to create customised insights and reports and many extra features such as our new geolocated search!

How to export your data to the free Chrome app
How to export your account history to SocialBro Pro, where you will also benefit from numerous added feature.

Please get in touch if you have any doubts! As always, we'd be thrilled to help.

Aviso a los usuarios de la versión de Adobe Air

Tu experiencia con SocialBro es algo que nos importa muchísimo, por eso hemos decidido no dar soporte a la versión de Adobe Air debido a la inestabilidad de la misma, causada por un bug de Adobe para el cual esperamos una solución desde hace más de un año.

Este bug podría afectar a los datos de tu cuenta de SocialBro y su posible pérdida. Dado que la solución para este problema no depende de nosotros, sintiéndolo mucho consideramos que la mejor decisión es dejar de soportar la versión de Adobe Air. Dejaremos de hacerlo a partir del 28 de febrero.

Puedes exportar tus datos a la aplicación de Chrome, también gratuita, o bien pasarte a la versión Pro, que es web.

Cómo exportar tus datos de la versión de Adobe Air a la app de Chrome
Cómo exportar tus datos a SocialBro Pro, donde tendrás muchas más ventajas que en cualquier versión de nuestra herramienta.

Para cualquier consulta que tengas no dudes en contactar con nosotros. ¡Estamos encantados de ayudarte!

Go Pro: Exclusive offer for our Chrome & Adobe Air users

2012-12-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

Here at SocialBro HQ we’ve had a brainwave! We really want you to get the most out of SocialBro, so we’re a launching a promotion to spur you to use our best version: the Pro
version.

If you subscribe to one of our web-app’s plans before 31 December you’ll get 50% off the monthly fee for the first 3 months. This is an exclusive offer for our Desktop (Chrome and Adobe Air) users.

And what’s best is that you can upgrade to SocialBro Pro bringing with you your free account’s entire history. See how to export your account history from the Desktop version to the web-app.

Why upgrade?

SocialBro Pro is the latest and the most advanced version of our platform. It’s a web-app designed specifically for Social Media and Marketing professionals, businesses, agencies and power Twitter users.

As a web-based platform, all your history, followers and friends are stored in the cloud, so you never have to worry about saving this data yourself. With SocialBro Pro you can also access your account from any computer, which is really convenient as you can open the tool from any location and in all popular browsers.

Take a quick look at the main differences between the Pro and the basic free version:

Nevertheless, if the free version fits your needs and requirements please keep using SocialBro for Chrome or Adobe Air, as we’ll continue to maintain the free version of our platform.

If you have any doubts about this offer or if you want to get more information before upgrading, please email us at premium-support@socialbro.com. We’re always happy to help!

Introducing Customized Insights & Reports

2012-11-28T06:57:00.000-08:00

SocialBro provides you with a lot of powerful data about your Twitter community and about any source you want to analyze: a competitor’s account, a Twitter list or a search. Now we’re introducing customized insights and reports! Get detailed stats about any segment you’d like to know about in-depth, both within your contacts or in all Twitter.

Knowing the characteristics of a specific segment of your community and also of your market is very powerful information. For example, you can generate a detailed Insights Report of your most influential followers, who have a high Kred score, and who are interested in Marketing. You can also investigate any business niche in order to target the audience of clients, customers and influencers and define the right people to engage with.

The new Custom Reports feature, which is exclusive to our Pro users, lets you personalize your reports with the specific graphs you consider more appropriate for each document and add the logo of your client or your company to the reports.

Monitor your growth day by day

Other news we’re announcing today is that now you can visualize the evolution of each panel of the dashboard. For example, you can monitor the daily growth of your new followers, recent unfollows, influential contacts, etc., comparing it with previous days and have an overview of each panel’s evolution.

This new feature allows you to analyze the impact of a goal-oriented campaign you’re carrying out on specific aspects of your Twitter account. Is your objective to get more followers, engage with more people, increase the number of influencers in your community, etc.? Now SocialBro helps you to see the effect of your campaign on these specific areas.

If you want to see the evolution over a given period of time, just select the area you want to analyze. Pass the mouse over the chart to get accurate information by date.

These new tools are exclusive for our users of SocialBro Pro. Want to become a Pro user? Try our 15 day free trial.

For handy tips and quick answers get in touch via Twitter. We’re always thrilled to hear from you! Why not leave a comment below?

SocialBro celebrates Black Friday!

2012-11-23T01:41:00.000-08:00

Here at SocialBro HQ we’re celebrating Black Friday with a great deal on SocialBro Pro. If you upgrade to our web-app today you’ll get 50% off the monthly fee for the first 3 months!

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving Day in the US. It’s the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, and most major retailers offer promotional sales to kick off the holiday shopping season. And we’re joining the party too!

Just add the promotional code “blackfriday” while purchasing SocialBro Pro. Our offer ends at midnight PST. Enjoy!

SocialBro integrates Kred as a new method for finding influencers

2012-10-25T07:07:00.001-07:00

Today we’re announcing our partnership with Kred, an awesome platform for measuring influence in online communities connected by interests. The integration of Kred within SocialBro allows you to discover influencers very easily, so you can focus on engaging with your most relevant contacts based on their Kred score

See how Kred differs from other influence metrics:

“The integration of Kred with SocialBro clearly shows the powerful intelligence that influence measurement gives social media marketers for managing their communities,” said Travis Wallis, Data + API Director, Kred. “We are really excited to see the imaginative, beautiful implementation of Kred into SocialBro’s dashboard. Social app developers are just starting to tap the power of influence to produce powerful, unique capabilities for their end users.”

You can now manage and analyze your Twitter community with Kred by filtering and ordering your contacts with this powerful metric. On your SocialBro Pro dashboard you’ll find a new panel that shows your Kred score by Influence and Outreach.

Each profile has the Kred metrics under the avatar with two parameters that compose the score: Influence and Outreach.

Understanding the scores

Kred provides a comprehensive score for Influence and Outreach by valuing engagement and interaction over follower count.

As Kred explains, Influence is the “ability to inspire action. It is scored on a 1,000 point scale. We measure Influence by assessing how frequently you are retweeted, replied, mentioned and followed on Twitter”, whilst Outreach “reflects generosity in engaging with others and helping them spread their message. Since we believe that the capacity generosity is infinite, your Outreach score is cumulative and always increases. As of June 2012 the highest Outreach Level anyone has reached is 12, and we expect that higher levels will certainly be achieved in the future. We measure Outreach on Twitter by your retweets, replies and mentions of others”.

If you have a SocialBro Pro account you can choose between either Kred or the PeerIndex score. In our user guide we explain all the details in the tutorial “Using Kred to find influential people on SocialBro”.

Want to become a Pro user? Try our 15 day free trial.

SocialBro launches new tools to help you track your engagements

2012-10-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

Very often we interact with so many people on Twitter, through mentions and retweets, that in many cases we lose track of these interactions. In other cases a particular profile sounds familiar to us but we’re not sure if we’ve previously made contact with this person or not.

These are very typical situations in social networks, so we’ve created a tool that helps you track all your engagements on Twitter. Find the Latest Interactions tool on your SocialBro Pro dashboard (this feature is exclusive for our Pro users).

When you click on the above icon a new panel opens up on the left of the screen. You can visualize all your interaction tweets, the tweets of those who have mentioned you and also those who you have mentioned in your tweets.

So far SocialBro has been wholly focused on the community, on the data about the people. However, these new features are totally focused on the content. Enjoy them!

Notice that those who you have engaged with have a blue “@” in the bottom right-hand corner of the user box. So when you click on it you’ll see all the interactions between you and this user.

New panels and new filter by time period

There are two new panels on the dashboard: “My influencers” and “I influence”. “My influencers” are the people who have influenced you, when you mention or retweet their tweets. Whilst the users who have mentioned you or retweeted your content appear in the “I influence” panel. As are all the panels on the Pro dashboard, these two new panels are automatically updated, so you can track your interactions on a daily basis.

Now when you browse each panel, notice that there is a new filter at the top of the dashboard, which allows you to modify the time frame of the filter, which allows you to keep track of your influencers.

There are some busy and buzzy days that make it impossible to follow or to reply in real-time to all the people who mention or retweet you. So, both the filter and the new engagement panels help you look back through your timeline in order to not lose track of those people who you’d like to connect with.

Please find on our user guide the tutorial How to Track your Engagements on Twitter with SocialBro.

Have you already tried the new tools? Do you think they will help you better engage with your community?

If you’re not a user of SocialBro Pro, try our 15 day free trial now. Drop us a line below or get in touch via Twitter for handy tips and quick answers. We’re thrilled to help you!