Steve Luu

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This indicates a growing passivity and a realization that social networks will not become the one stop shop for the total internet experience that they have often been hyped as delivering.”

Attending LeWeb a couple of weeks ago, many of us saw Forrester CEO George Colony, as Mark Evans from Sysomos put it, “…he threw a bucket of cold water on social media by suggesting people have no more time for social media and, in particular social media services.”

The quote from George Colony read, “We believe social is running out of hours. Forrester believes we are reaching the limit of hours that people can give to social.” 

I am certain he is onto something. Even the Global Web Index report on US social media behavior reveals that social users are lightening up on the content creation,

“One consequence of real-time social is a move from creating content to sharing other peoples content. We call this the rise of the “transmitter ecosystem”….We also see that there is a continual fall in most activities and forms of contribution on social networks. This indicates a growing passivity and a realization that social networks will not become the one stop shop for the total internet experience that they have often been hyped as delivering.”

Narrow definitions are confusing

Will people commit more time to the social distractions of reading and updating Facebook-like social networks? Probably not. Time is our premium resource. But that’s a narrow definition of “social.” Most digital experiences will be social in one way or another whether they be utilities like my Jetsetter iPad app, information tools like my new Flipboard iPhone app or entertainment experiences like some of the best YouTube videos (I love the Criminal Minds cast video “Wheels Up”). People will continue to shift time to those things that deliver perceived value.

While I would assume that some media buckets like TV watching are here to stay and are unlikely to be completely cannibalized by new digital activities, the fact that my son watches most of the little TV he likes on his PC may deliver bigger behavior changes down the road than even Forrester can predict. 

For brands considering how much to commit to social media as a platform for customer engagement, I would just say two things:

• Most brands are woefully behind the behaviors of their customers in digital and social. While some behaviors may be topping out or slowing growth are you using social media at the same level and with the same time commitment as your customer? Probably plenty of room for growth there. 
• If anything, the Forrester POV and The Global Web Index findings tell a story of consumer fatigue on those things that don’t provide enough value. The pressure is on every brand to work hard to deliver content and experiences to their customers that they would find valuable. Relevance will get harder going into 2012. 

What’s the point of social media for businesses if they can’t measure its efficacy, right? With that in mind, we’ve seen a steady stream of tools designed to help businesses – and individuals – manage and monitor their social media activity.

The latest one to hit us is one called Retweet, a service launched, it says, “to help businesses, brands and individuals understand how effective their use of Twitter is.”

Retweet is free to use and, as its name suggests, it measures the reach of individual tweets, how many times they are retweeted and how many Twitter users they subsequently reach. Kieron Donoghue is the man behind the new tool, an entrepreneur with “over a decade’s experience in online business”. He’s also the man behind ShareMyPlaylists, a neat music-sharing tool we’ve written about before.

Donoghue says that Retweet can help measure which Twitter users are your ambassadors, and which engage with your tweets the most, creating leaderboards displaying your most effective messages. “Retweet.co.uk is ideal for gauging the effectiveness of Twitter campaigns”, says Donoghue. “It allows organisations and brands to see which messages were popular, which users retweeted them and what the tweet’s total reach was – that’s the number of Twitter users exposed to a message.”

So how does it work? Firstly, you have to connect your Twitter profile with the Web app:

After a few moments, your timeline will become populated and along the top you’ll see a menu, which lets you choose which view you’d like to see, though it defaults to the full ‘Retweet Stats’ list.

You’ll see a long stream containing all your tweets from your whole history, divided into 20 tweets per page. To the left of each tweet, you’ll see how many retweets each received:

You can then click on a particular tweet to glean more information on the retweeters, whilst hovering over their profiles reveals how many followers they have:

So how useful is this information for brands? “If certain individuals or organisations are always retweeting you, you can reach out to these ambassadors”, says Donoghue.

As you can see, there’s also a “Share these stats” option, which creates a unique URL to share across the social sphere, though it’s not clear who will actually find this information useful. It seems it’s perhaps a better feature for internal use to share within an organization, rather than telling the world how popular a particular tweet was.

Clicking on ‘Top Retweets’ from the main menu will show you a leaderboard, outlining which of your tweets received the most retweets:

Finally, if you click on ‘Who you retweet’, you’ll see a leaderboard of the top Twitter profiles you’ve retweeted since your account was launched:

Retweet could be a useful tool for brands to quickly see which users engage with them most frequently, and it’s also a useful tool for seeing which kind of tweets perform well at a glance. Similarly, individuals who are curious to see their entire retweeting history may also find this platform appealing.

Of course, it doesn’t bring a great deal of data to the table, but that is part of the appeal here. It’s a very simple way of viewing basic retweet data if that’s all that interests you. It would’ve been good, however, if there was a way to see which of your followers retweet you the most, as there is with the leaderboard which shows you who you retweet the most – it seems this is only possible by manually sifting through the data and making notes.

So Retweet.co.uk isn’t a tool for social media professionals, in the same way as DataSift, or even Research.ly, which we’ve written about before. But you may find it a useful tool nonetheless.

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