Social media has shown immense potential in observing conversations and deriving insights from it. This growing requirement has provided an equally growing opportunity for tech firms and startups. Over the years we have seen quite a few Indian social media monitoring companies who are either building products that monitor conversations on the Internet or trying to provide insights on competitor social media monitoring. Explic8, a Germin8 Solutions product falls in the initial category of monitoring conversations.
The product is a social media monitoring tool that is helping brands to track conversations over the Internet and provide visual insights for further decision-making. Explic8 has a simple email login process, though adding social login could be a great add-on feature.
Starting up and creating a tracker
Once the account is created, one would require to create trackers so that the product can monitor conversations for the same. For the review I entered “Aam Aadmi Party” (AAP) as the tracker since these days everyone is talking about the year-old political party. Apart from General Parameters, Source, Ontology and Instance Definition are some of the other parameters that needs to be filled.
It takes a while for the product to start collecting relevant data. If required the tracker could be paused or deleted at a later instance. The below screen grab gives a quick snapshot of the data tracked in the last seven days for my tracker.
Dashboard insights
Besides this the Dashboard provides further visual insights on the percentage distribution of the different sources, sentiment distribution, top adjectives or the word cloud, authors contributing into conversations, gender distribution and tracking results based on locations.All these visual data could be explored more by clicking on them and can be exported in different formats too.
For example for the tracker AAP, Facebook is driving the conversations, followed by Twitter. If you further click on the Facebook percentage, the product pulls out Verbatim List that shares the entire list of conversation from Facebook, marking the sentiments, importance and the date associated.
Select any one such conversation in the thread and you are taken one level deeper with more insights on the particular content. Now you can get further details such as the link of the post, author and when it was posted. Not sure if AAP has the bandwidth to track such minute level of information but for a brand, this could be minefield of insights to not only understand the performance of their product or service better but also provide a window to reach out to the person if required.
However, AAP should be concerned about the negative sentiments (65%) that has spiked up in the last seven days.
Apart from the Dashboard, the product provides competitor analysis and for that I added a new tracker ‘Online Retail Store’. The tracker pulled out more than 4.5K conversations from the last 5 days. The conversations involved major online retail store players such as Flipkart, Mydala, Jabong, Tradus, Snap Deal among others.
For an eCommerce company, data like Sentiment Distribution, Features Distribution is exciting as it provides details of competitor conversations. For example according to the analysis, Shipping and Packaging drives the maximum number of conversations along with Sales, Customer Service, among others. One can click further into the graph to pull out detailed conversations and further related information about the conversations.
Besides these the product offers real time alerts and reports that can be customized according to user needs.
Can Explic8 be better?
Explic8, provides with a smooth experience and easy management. The insights provided right now are interesting and required ones. Features like categorize discussions under different topics, top authors and top words, competitor analysis, among others make it an exciting product. However, the firm needs to work on its design and data display. Addressing issues from within the product could be made more user friendly.
Webfluenz, the social media intelligence tool which we had reviewed previously, is also a startup trying to crack the market in the similar domain. Features like Engage and Competitor insights make Webfluenz a competitive product. Engage allows you to get the list of influential people with links and allows a smart way to engage with them. Competitor feature allows brands to keep a tab on their competitors.
If you are a brand or an enthusiast of social media analytics then do give a shot to Explic8 and let us know your feedback.
Image credit: 100open.com
Prasant Naidu is the Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. Loves to experiment in social media and believes social media is a game changer for SME’s.
Article published with permission from Lighthouse Insights
