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Tool of the week for journalists – Playground, to monitor social media analytics

Tool of the week: Playground, by PeopleBrowsr.

This post was first published on Journalism.co.uk

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts.

How is it of use to journalists? “Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground,” PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains.

Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities.

These features – and many more – let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject.

Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists.

Grill added:

The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community.

You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Jodee Rich, the founder of PeopleBrowsr, gave an inspiring speech at the Strata Summit in September on how a TV ratings system such as Nielsen could soon be replaced by social media data thanks to the advanced online analytics that PeopleBrowsr offers.

 

Playground’s development is based on feedback from its community of users, which has been very responsive. Ideas can be sent to contact[@]peoplebrowsr.com or by tweeting@peoplebrowsr.

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Twitter: Is It All About Timing? [Infographic]

SOCIALMOUTHS (Original post can be found here)

Yes, it feels good to talk about Twitter after spending a full week discussing Facebook’s major announcement. And why not, a little bit of Google+ too.

By the way, I was just reading today’s post from Jeff Bullasand I’m happy to see that even when Facebook hijacked the Internet, Google+ was able to grow nearly 9 million in 2 days. That’s pretty impressive.

But like I said, let’s please talk about Twitter for a change.

This infographic from Lemon.ly talks about Twitter timing and I thought I’d share it with you because it seems to be a regular concern. One of the questions I often get from clients and readers is “What is the best time to Tweet?” and while I think there is no one-size-fits-all kind of answer for this, at least this data lets you visualize a trend.

For example in my case, I agree with the AM timeframe but in the PM, I find that I get the most activity and best results between 3 and 5pm. I also agree with the usage percentage by day of the week although one of my favorite days to spend on Twitter are Fridays and according to this analysis it doesn’t get the action Tuesdays get. Like I said, that’s just me, the point is that you might have your own preferences.

The important thing is that you allow yourself to test the waters.

That’s not all on the infographic, there are other interesting numbers like how many Tweets happen per second or what was the hottest event. Let’s take a look at it and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Twitter timing infographic

Infographic courtesy of Lemon.ly

Over To You

What do you think? What are YOUR best times to tweet? Are you more active on certain days of the week? Share your comments!

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The Science of Social Timing [infographic]

Mind Jumpers – By Charu Dwivedi

We all post content on Facebook. Sometimes it’s well read, sometimes not, in spite of putting in our best effort and intentions. Well, apart from what we post, it is important to know when we post. In this blog post, I will attempt to highlight the different social media timing preferences and how they impact different businesses by looking at Buddy Media’s report on effective wall posts published earlier this year together with a recent infographic by Dan Zarrella atHubSpot.

To understand the impact of accurate social media timing, we earlier referred to the Buddy Media report that gave sector wise break-ups of the interest level for every post and time at which it is supposed to peak and tank.

Most effective time to post
According to the Buddy Media report, brands that post outside business hours have 20% higher engagement rates. As a result, for instance content aimed for US, Asian and European consumers will benefit from being timed differently. In the same way, every industry is said to have different traction on different days. The same report also quotes that posts show a higher engagement on a few days compared to others. For example, sports industry and automotive industry have the highest traction on Sundays whereas entertainment peaks on Thursdays and Fridays (18% higher rates). Business and finance hit high on mid week.

General observations:
– Shares on Facebook spike around 7PM, while Twitter spikes around noon.

– On Facebook, content shared on a Saturday is more effective, while Twitter gets the highest engagement mid week. Also, it is good to share 1 post in every 2 days on Facebook.

However, here is an interesting infographic on timing in social networks, which I found on Socialmediagraphics.com. It highlights consumer behaviour on different social media channels, namely Twitter and Facebook. The infographic, The Science of Social Timing, gives us insight into posting at which time to make the content most sharable.

Take a look at the infographic here:

science-of-social-timing-part-1