digital marketing

Social Media tools: the best tools are your eyes and your brains

In the series of missing social media tools, there’s one more addition: Twitter Counter. I mention here my friend and co-author Hervé Kabla, who on his blog Kablages wrote an article on the recent disappearance of Twitter Counter. Certainly, some of you are wondering what Twitter Counter was.

The ‘dead social media tools society’

Twitter Counter is, or rather was, a tool that allows you to monitor the progress of a Twitter account, including benchmarking an account against another.Among other things, it was used to identify the not-so-wise guys who buy followers.

social media tools
Bygone Social Media Tools

Hereunder is the account of a large CAC40 company, whose name has been blurred intentionally; it’s a bit late to worry about it, because this massive purchase of followers took place 4 years ago.
Twitter Counter was among the most used social media tools

Social media tools that have disappeared

Twitter Counter is not the first social media tool to disappear. We had Klout not long ago, and Kred before it. All the free tools of social media are disappearing one after the other.It is true that Twitter Counter had not changed for 10 years. This domain has been considerably monetized in recent years, along with its inherent tools. This should not come as a surprise for users.
All the students I teach, year after year, seem to be obsessed with social media tools and they all expect everything to be free.After all, the Internet is built on the freemium model and we cannot blame them for nurturing such expectations. Alas for them, the best things come to an end. We will have to pay to use these tools now.

The social media tools that remain

But, we have something to be happy about: there are still some dinosaurs, among these social media tools, which are available for free.These include Fanpage karma (it will only work for 15 days with a temporary account), Twittonomy (also dangerously unmaintained for at least 5 years), social mention, tweetreach and tweetbinder.
We do have a few free tools at our disposal yet. Blogpieces on this subject are numerous, even though some of them are more or less out of date.
All of them will still be more or less free, but there exists another solution.

The best social media tools: your eyes and your brains

I know that students do not like to hear that, but tools as such are not worth much. They measure everything, but not everything goes into the equation. Conversations are not quantifiable, the quality of a brand’s responses is not amenable to statistics, and the quality of its content strategy cannot always be translated into pie charts.
The best social media tools will always be your eyes and your brains, and the good news is that these tools will always be free. However, the bad news is that they are being used less and less. It’s a paradox to ponder and put into perspective.
Here is the English translation and the link to the post of my friend Hervé Kabla on his French blog .

Bye Bye Twitter Counter by Hervé Kabla

Time is flying, and the social network ecosystem is constantly changing. One of the latest events we witnessed was the disappearance of Twitter Counter. This tool, created in 2008, proposed statistics on the evolution of Twitter accounts, especially in terms of published tweets and changes in the number of followers. With Twitter Counter, we had access to data less than 6 months old, for free.
The information collected by Twitter Counter was certainly redundant as compared to that provided by Twitter API, and we can consider that in some way, Twitter Counter could have overshadowed Twitter. In particular, Twitter Counter offered a very simple graphical interface to access data for the last month, the last quarter or the last six months.
Twitter Counter ranked Twitter accounts by audience, which could indicate whether you fitted in the top 10, the top 1000 or the top 1,000,000 of the entirety of Twitter users. An earlier version used to provide comparisons of the evolution of two Twitter accounts. Both in terms of tweets and changes in the number of subscribers. One could have even compared the evolution of the number of subscribers and the number of tweets created.
Alas, this period is over. Twitter Counter is gone, and we will have to resort to other tools- paid ones – to collect similar information.
 

Yann Gourvennec
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Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. ———————————————————— Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »
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