I am extremely proud to be part of the #PRStack community. The idea of crowd sourcing tool ideas and 'hacks' to save time and modernise the workflow in the PR industry has been a longtime coming. 

My business started in PR back in 2003 and I very quickly saw the Tsunami coming towards 'old media' prior to the recession, fortunately Montage Communications was quick on its feet and adapted its storytelling PR skills to social media and digital content.

Unfortunately many of my peers were not quick enough to adapt, despite my efforts with 'PRBristol' to try (unsuccessfully) to educate the PRs in South West about social media and blogging at the time. 

I share the concerns of Stephen Waddington that the PR industry is somewhat protectionist with its knowledge and as a result slow to adapt, as the ex CIPR president he should know!  

If we work together to crowd source solutions, it quickly develops the skills of others. You learn from me and I learn from you! 

I strongly believe this is why the digital industry has developed much quicker in its growth and productivity, through the use of Hackathons for example where coders share and collaborate to solve a common problem, whilst accelerating their own learning. 

Well the good news is that finally PR has it's own hackathon now and its called #PRstack.

Read my contribution below and share your PR coding skills at PRstack too here. 

Using Topsy for social media influencer and competitor analysis

There are lots of social media monitoring tools but they all have two common problems, data accuracy and cost. Topsy is an excellent compromise.

No matter what vendors claim, tool data is never 100% accurate for sentiment and results are often filled with spam from various sources.

The fact of the matter is that you also need a real pair of eyes - a human - to filter any social media analysis to make rational sense of it. You can’t take any off-the-shelf reports for granted.

Social media monitoring isn’t cheap; Radion 6, UberVu or Alterian can run into the $1,000s of dollars a month, so you are unlikely to be able to justify this cost with your bosses, especially if you are doing speculative research for a pitch.

Add this cost to an intern/account exec to filter the data, and you will certainly need to build a business case for social media monitoring. So how do you change this?

An accurate (and free) social media monitoring tool to build a business case

Topsy is currently free for its basic search and I have known it to out perform some paid for social media monitoring tools. It covers Twitter very well. There was an advanced professional version that was impressive, but paid for, although this is not available at the time of writing.

Figure: Home Page - Easy to Use Like Google

Unlike a lot of social media monitoring tools, the interface is as easy to use as Google, allowing you to filter Tweets, photos, videos and influencers (more on this in a moment).

The system even has an advantage of being able to cover all Tweets going back to 2006. A lot of paid for monitoring tools will only go back 90 days!

I decided to use #Election2015 as an example.

Influencer analysis with Topsy

Once you have hit search, the user can filter the results by time, links, video, photos, Tweets and even language on the next page.

Figure: Search results page and where to find the influencer function.

If are happy with the results, you can click on influencers to find key social media users that you should approach to effectively spread your message, based on the subject area that you are searching for.

Click on ‘influencers’ on the left hand menu to get the report below:

Figure: Influcencer data page and what they are talking about.

How to benchmark competitor activity on social media using Topsy

Figure: Social analytics page where you can compare search terms.

Under the social analytics tab there is an option to compare search terms and you can add competitor brands to compare the amount of social activity.

On the face of it, it would seem that UKIP did very well during the leaders’ debate, as well as the Greens, as there is a spike in activity on 2 April.

But remember my point at the start of this article that you must challenge any social media analysis.

Figure: Insight when hovering over a data point on the social analytics page (UKIP).

Spikes in activity do not always mean a superior campaign. It could be a negative reaction.

In the analytics page you can hover on a spike in activity to see what was the most popular post driving mentions, in this case it was a critical post left on the UKIP Bromley office.

Figure: Insight when hovering over a data point on the social analytics page (Greens).

The Green party favoured very well during the Leaders’ Debate and gained a good reaction on Twitter. If we hover over the spike in mentions for the Green party we can see this reaction on Twitter (see right).

Rather interestingly, Labour and the Lib Dems had much fewer mentions on Topsy during the leaders’ debates.

How to find the best performing content

When you are devising a social media strategy, it is always a good idea to take a look at the best performing content on social media from your competitors or content around a subject area that people like to share or find interesting.

Figure: Social trends page

While Topsy is not as accurate as perhaps some of the paid for models and does not cover forums for example, it is still a very useful social media monitoring tool. Due to the ease of use and speed of setting up it’s great for ‘quick and dirty’ social media analysis, that can inform strategies or be used for a business case to access budget for paid for social media monitoring solutions.

[This article first appeared on PRStack here]