End of last week, social media campaign management platform Spredfast has gone live. Yesterday I started testing it, and I must say, I am impressed.
I sent a mail to co-founder Kenneth Cho (and we ended up talking for an hour or so on the phone). Ken unveiled some things that are yet to come, and I got even more impressed. Now, what is Spredfast, how does it work and why the heck should you consider using it?
You know that there are several tools and platforms for social media management. They range from free and simple ‘listening tools’ to high-end systems such as Radian6. Recently, in my interview with Jim Sterne, we talked about the evolutions in that market. However, I didn’t know Spredfast then yet.
Last month I wrote about Dave Chaffey’s list of online brand reputation and social media listening software. There were more tools added in the comment list since then, and I started testing them out (I must have tested half of them now). And then, this week-end I discovered Spredfast (should mention it to Dave).
Dave and Michael Brewer defined several categories to list the tools they found: wide scope analytical and reporting tools for all aspects of monitoring customer opinions and campaign effectiveness, blog based influence assessment tools, designed to gain access to influential customers/commentators, PR and media management tools for reputation management and assessing opinion forming influence, social media tracking and intervention, fraud protection, security and threat detection, news media tracking and social media within sales management, for identifying B2B prospects. You can check out the list here.
Managing, monitoring and measuring your voice across multiple social media channels
Back to Spredfast. Spredfast is a (I quote) “social media campaign management platform that allows an organization to manage, monitor, and measure its voice across multiple social media channels”.
Now, what’s so special about that? Well, let me tell you how it works and gave my impressions after one day of testing and then decide. OK, let’s get started. Of course you start with setting up your account, etc. (don’t forget to go to my account and select your timezone!). Once you’ve done all that, and you sign in to Spredfast, you can create a campaign (if you already created campaigns you see a screen with the results and can create a new one using the tab). Creating a campaign is simple: you give your campaign a name, a start date and an end date. You also give it a description and select your industry. Finally, you can associate it with a client (for instance, if you’re an agency).
Then you select the objectives of the campaign. There’s a whole list you can choose from (demand generation, brand awareness, brand engagement, etc.), or you can create your own. Now, in case you wonder why you should do that, let’s say that it will help you in the longer term. Ask yourself this: why does your email marketing platform ask you what’s your industry? And then take it a social media step further.
Next you set up some voices because, I quote, “in order to manage multiple accounts across several services, your campaign is organized into voices. Each voice represents a group of accounts, which are related to each other. You must create at least one voice with an account in order to publish content”.
What it boils down to is that you add your Twitter accounts, blogs (multiple platforms are supported), Facebook accounts, LinkedIn accounts, Flickr account, YouTube channels, etc. to be able to disperse the messages for the campaign. Ken told me other social media will be added.
Next you schedule an event (for instance, instance a tweet) that you can repeat over time according to several parameters, or you do a so-called quick post (for instance, instance tweeting something right away). In the case of Twitter of course a URL shortener is provided (bit.ly). You can keep adding events all the time.
Measuring engagement, reach and activity with Spredfast
Finally, you add a number of “streams” that you set up with various services such as Google Blog Search, to name just one from an impressive list, using keywords, to monitor all social media conversations. And then comes the fun – and for me important – part: metrics, analytics, let’s say measuring the impact of your campaign.
There is quite some HootSuite going on, a whole lot of social media listening, monitoring, tracking and, as I just said, lots of analytics.
Since Spredfast is mainly about engagement, the powerful measurement tools allow you to analyze and measure engagement, reach and activity. The metrics and analytics possibilities are impressive. There is integration with Google Analytics, there are sharing tools, you can repeat campaigns, etc. In short, viral marketing, monitoring, analysis, social listening, and all the rest in one solution.
I still have many features to test but this is a winner, especially if you look at the price tag. There is also a version for agencies and there are very interesting alliances in the pipeline. I am very curious about the first reactions from people who start testing it like me. There is a free trial period so no worries.
For the record: this is not a sponsored post, never do those. In case you want to know more before testing it, there are feature overviews and tutorial videos on the site: www.spredfast.com.
Originally posted on i-SCOOP’s Social Email Marketing blog and moved as part of an integration.
