Welcome readers, this week’s post will be focusing on the use of social media monitoring tools. Honda has been chosen as the guinea pig for this experiment. Honda (Motor Company, Limited) is a Japanese company founded in 1948 and is primarily known as a manufacturer of auto-mobiles and motor cycles. Honda is also a top world provider of power and marine equipment, according to Edward Miller (2008) Honda produces more than 14 million internal combustion engines each year (click HERE for their Wiki page). The two social media monitoring tools that have been selected are HowSociable and Topsy.
HowSocialble is a simple, online social media monitoring tool which allows the user to measure their brands impact on the social web since 2008. HowSociable provides users with a free 4 different analysis metrics on their chosen brand or organization and up to 12 different metrics once a free account has been created. HowSociable also provides a fee based subscription account which allows users to receive additional information and further analysis up to 36 different metrics.
My experience with this monitoring tool provided me with a user-friendly and informative experience. I simply entered the “Name or Brand” field with my target organization being “Toyota” and was instantly yielded results. As per inspiration from a fellow blogger in INB346 (QUT), I thought it would be interesting to compare Toyota against one of its competitors for a more in-depth analysis of their social web presence. In this case, Toyota has been selected as one of Hondas top competition in the auto-mobile industry. Below is the results from HowSocialble after entering the key terms “Honda” and “Toyota”.
As per the results, it is apparent that “Toyota” has a higher overall web presence within those top 4 social networks. However, Honda posses a slightly higher magnitude (level of activity around the brand during a given week). An interesting figure is Honda’s presence on the Professional networking site “LinkedIn” being minimal if not none. A stronger emphasis should be used on this platform to further obtain new customers and create networks.
Topsy is an online social media monitoring tool that provides social insights on any term instantly. It provides users with social analytics of in putted terms, finds the most influential twitter authors on a given topic and provides an exposure of an event or campaign by searching through, photos, links, videos, tweets and influencers. An upgrade to Topsy pro with a subscription fee is available allow users with further information and features. Similar with HowSociable, I have used Toyota as a competitor to analyse against Honda’s social media presence.
The social analytics from Topsy indicated that within the last month, Honda received a massive total of 643 179 tweets opposed to Toyota with a total of 486 892. These results from the world of Twitter indicated that Honda is a lot more tweeted about than Toyota whether they are positive or negative comments.
Recommendations and Limitations
In terms of Topsy, a issue is how can the user determine whether the tweets received in the last month are positive or negative. In this scenario although Honda has more tweets, but maybe they are receiving more negative tweets currently? Topsy also have implemented a feature recording the amount of tweets received in the last 6 hours which provides users with a up-to-date metric on their chosen search term. HowSociable is a excellent monitoring tool as it provides the user with metrics from a range of different social media sites, it is interesting to see the level of activity within each type of social media and the companies strengths/weaknesses. It is recommended that a filter is provided for HowSociable to allow the user to filter “time” rather than viewing social activity from 2008
This concludes my blog post for this week. Which social media monitoring tool do you think is the best for social analytics? I prefer HowSociable as it provides a thorough analysis across a range of social media. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment!
Izaaz