Some (Free) Social Media Tools

There are a lot of social media tools out there, a lot of those are professional paid tools such as Hootsuite and Salesforce, but in a crunch there are a few “free” tools that can help provide a quick snap shot in the social media arena. A few of them like SocialBakers, Iconosquare and Topsy can provide a quick insight to how a brand is trending and allow marketer to do finite adjustment or react to the current situation.

Just to illustrate the point we have pick Tim Hortons, Starbucks and McDonald as our guinea pig and see what we can find if we our client is Tim Hortons.  Just remember this are free tools so the data are so what limited in range and capabilities.

In SocialBakers we compare the Facebook activities between our three subjects and the result is rather unremarkable. So in the world of Facebook “All quiet on the western front”. For that no action needed at this time.

socialbaker

 

Then we look at Iconosquare and again look at the result, we can see Starbuck is way out in front. Then again there is no surprise here, Starbuck have 900 media far exceed McDonald and Tim Hortons and from that sense our advise will be up the number of media posts to close the gap.

 

Finally, we look at the tweets with Topsy we can see a spike on November 9 and if we examine the event closer the spike related to the roll out of Starbuck’s generic looking Christmas cup. The spike are short lived and will have limited impact in overall sales in the long run. But for short terms it did generate a lot of buzz for Starbucks, but for Tim Hortons no action will be needed at this time.