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Ben Ellis

Social Analytics Tools That Don’t Suck Feature Image

Social Analytics Tools That Don’t Suck

I sent this Tweet the other day: https://twitter.com/fr314/status/608246584741117952 To say that it caused quite a stir would be an understatement: it resulted in a few replies, a couple of calls, quite a few DMs and several emails, ranging from pitches to people sharing their own

· 8 min · Social Analytics

Keyword Searching vs. Hashtag Searching Feature Image

Keyword Searching vs. Hashtag Searching

A lot of social listening tools out there have clever ways of monitoring hashtags: Synthesio, for instance, has a special search field for any hashtags you’d like to monitor; Brandwatch has a dedicated Boolean operator for hashtags (“hashtags:”). Even Twitter lets you search for hashtags separately from keywords when

· 3 min · Social Listening

Impressions ≠ Reach Feature Image

Impressions ≠ Reach

I wrote about Twitter reach and impressions a couple of years ago (here). That was before Twitter revamped their Analytics dashboard. That was before Twitter gave us a good amount of metrics. Twitter analytics evolved considerably in those 2 years, but one thing seems to remain: the confusion between reach

· 3 min · Social Analytics

“Hyperengaged”: the Twitter Engagement Rate that Shouldn’t Be Feature Image

“Hyperengaged”: the Twitter Engagement Rate that Shouldn’t Be

I saw this Tweet from Gareth Price a while ago and I thought I’d write something about it: https://twitter.com/g_price/status/563024295212113920 An engagement rate of 186.7% clearly sounds good…but it also sounds paradoxical: how can you have an engagement rate beyond 100%? I’

· 3 min · Social Analytics

Disrupt Enterprise Reviews Feature Image

Disrupt Enterprise Reviews

TrustRadius released a buyer’s guide to enterprise social media management software just recently, and it’s pure gold: lots of great recommendations and great insights from those who use the tools named in the report. It’s also nice to see some of my old-time favourite vendors on

· 8 min · Social Management

What's the best tool for Web Analytics? Feature Image

What's the best tool for Web Analytics?

There’s a long list of web analytics tools available out there: some are free, others come at a price; some are basic and they do the job just right, while others take a 360-degree approach and offer a lot more than just web analytics. When people ask me

· 6 min · web analytics