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Everything Digital

November 15, 2014 — 2

Ode to Brandwatch

brandwatch logo

I was at Social Media London Live a few days ago and I saw , a great guy from a company called Brandwatch. Now, you may have heard of Brandwatch before, especially if you work in social media, digital marketing, or if you’ve been following this blog for some time. I’m a sucker for great tools, so it’s no wonder that I’m a strong advocate for Brandwatch (and I guess you could even call me a “Brandwatch ambassador”, but that sounds somewhat pompous).

Although marketed as a “social listening tool”, Brandwatch is a lot more than that. See, there are social listening tools. Then there are social monitoring tools, offering you live monitoring of a specific topic or subject, a keyword, a brand, a hashtag – you name it. With the plethora of tools and features that Brandwatch offers, it doesn’t just fall in a singular category, but it sits on top of several categories, and does it well.

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September 15, 2014 — 1

Best Times and Days to Post on Social Media?

I often hear the following:

“Post outside of working hours and during lunchtime, for people who want something to read during their lunch break…”

I personally have a problem with generic recommendations on best times and days to post, as well as “scientific guides on best and worst times to post on social media”. Here’s why.

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September 9, 2014 — 2

Campaign Tracking on Social Media

Here’s what I believe – most campaign tracking on social media sucks. Heavily!

Whether you’re a Google Analytics power-user, or perhaps you only use it occasionally, you know that campaign tracking can be a lifesaver to manage your owned traffic. You wouldn’t send a monthly newsletter without properly tagging your links, right? You wouldn’t advertise your site on a magazine or a TV ad without campaign tracking, right?

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September 8, 2014 — 1

Content Is NOT King

Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

“Content is king”.

This expression was great the first time I heard it. Maybe the second time too. It stopped amazing me the third time onwards.

This usually comes with the variation of:

  • Content is king, and context is queen
  • Content is fuel
  • Content is fire

(For more associations, just search for )

Personally, I don’t believe content is king.

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September 7, 2014 — 1

Social Media Analytics FAQ

After a long hiatus from meetups, conferences and “digital events”, I finally returned to the London Web Analytics meetup, a great London-based meetup for people interested in all things analytics.

The subject for this month’s meetup was social media analytics, pretty topical considering that I work in social media analytics day in and day out.

I met quite a few great people there, including the lovely Samantha Sile…

I had lots of interesting conversations, and I also had my first-ever analytics selfie…

Needless to say, it was an amazing night.

However, there were more questions than answers during the meetup. Granted, I should’ve raised my hand and intervened a bit more often than I did, but I took notes of the “hot topics” and unanswered questions that were raised that night. While I did my best to answer those who raised their questions after the meetup, I thought – what better way to tackle this than with a blog post? So, here it is.

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August 11, 2014 — 0

Brandwatch and the Power of Hindsight

I briefly touched on Brandwatch’s latest feature, Hindsight, in my previous post. Just to recap – Brandwatch now offers full historical Twitter data since Twitter’s inception in 2006, thanks to a new feature called Hindsight. Combined with the already thorough archive of other online sources stretching back to 2010, Brandwatch have further solidified their social listening and monitoring solution as the main tool of choice to access the most comprehensive archive of social data.

As exciting as Hindsight sounds, it’s not just a nice-to-have feature: based on what you’re trying to accomplish, it can play a vital role in your overall strategy.

Frankly, with all this unbridled stream of Twitter data, there’s no limit to what you can do. Here are 10 practical examples.

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August 4, 2014 — 5

Twitter APIs vs Twitter Firehose: Why The Difference Matters

If you’re looking to listen to the chatter on social media, specifically Twitter, you need to have a tool that can adequately do so based on your needs.

Thankfully there are lots of tools out there that can help you with social listening on Twitter. However, while a lot of these tools (free and premium) will say that “they have access to Twitter”, it’s worth enquiring about the type of access they have. This can dictate not only the accuracy of your search results, but also how many mentions you’ll get, as well as their recency (i.e. real-time mentions or past mentions).

There are currently three ways to access Twitter:

  • Search API
  • Streaming API
  • Twitter Firehose

While you may have already heard of “Twitter Firehose”, it’s worth explaining what the difference is between these three types of access, and how they can impact you.

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July 21, 2014 — 1

So Long Clutter, So Long Numbers

If you’ve been following this blog for a while then you may have noticed a change in theme and layout. I’ve gone from a full multipurpose theme to a stripped down layout. No more fancy drop down menus, no more funky animations, no more colour coding my articles by category. Just text, a bit of blue at the top, and a simple navigation. I had to make this change, as a detox from clutter and numbers.

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July 15, 2014 — 5

Twitter Analytics 2.0

It was just a little over a year ago that Twitter released the Twitter Analytics Dashboard to advertisers and publishers. Now, Twitter have revamped their analytics dashboard, introducing “an enhanced Tweet activity dashboard to provide measurable insights into how your organic Tweets perform”. Welcome to Twitter Analytics 2.0.

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July 6, 2014 — 2

Vine – Where Loops Count

Vine

The Vine app and platform received an update on July 1st, introducing a minor redesign of the Home Feed and a revamp of the Activity Feed that notifies you when you reach certain milestones. However, the most important announcement was the introduction of a new metric: Loops. This will change the way marketers and advertisers use Vine, and here’s why.

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