This article was published on February 21, 2011

SocialGrapple gives you insights on your Twitter competition.


SocialGrapple gives you insights on your Twitter competition.

How do you monitor on Twitter who stopped following you and started to follow a competitor? What would be the fastest way to compare how many Twitter followers you share with another Twitter account? Both answers and more can be found using Social Grapple.

The site is still in early development and was built by Andrey Petrov. Petrov previously built another Twitter service called Tweetspect where the idea for Social Grapple was originally devloped.

Social Grapple is a service that gives you detailed analytics from Twitter across different accounts. There is long list of Twitter analytics services that allow you to monitor accounts.  Some like TwitterCounter allows  you to compare follower counts with competitors like the free version Social Grapple. But it is the only services that allow you to compare the information about followers across accounts that you do not own.

The site is easy to use but if you really want to experience it fully the free service will not be much use. There are two premium packages Social Butterfly for $10/month and Kingpin for $40/month, which vary on the size of the account you want to monitor.


After you upgrade your account you need to wait a few days for it to collate the data. At the end of each night the service pulls in new information. I upgraded two accounts, my personal Twitter account @FatemaYasmine and Petrov’s account @shazow.

Once the upgrade has been completed 6 buttons will appear: Tweets, Followers, Following, Mutual, Stalking and Stalkers. Pressing any of these buttons shows a graph.

The Buttons are self explanatory visualization of time graphs.

Stalker Graph (above) – My stalkers increased as I joined TNW

Below the graph there is a detailed report of changes that have happened with your followers with tags next to them. The tags represent important bits of information about the account which allow you to quickly skim and determine which accounts are worth paying attention to (high ratio, mutual, stalking) and which accounts may be spammers (badratio, new).

Another big feature is comparing accounts. There is a box on the top left and when filled it takes you to a diagram that compares both accounts and highlights how many mutual Tweeps you both follow or follow you

Having access to this information about a competitor is powerful, it blows wide open the doors for Twitter customer poaching. Additionally with the analytics it is possible to determine which events triggered a sudden rush of followers to both you or a competitor, like a new marketing campaign. The converse of that would also be possible, track an event that lead to a mass exodus of followers.

Additional features that we can expect soon are:

  • Daily/weekly activity summary emails.
  • Tracking how long a follower has been following you. So when someone unfollows you, you’ll see “@x unfollowed you after 3 months.”
  • Increasing the report granularity from daily to hourly.

If you are a business or a marketing person or anyone that is interested in Twitter and the relationship followers have across different brands this will be a must use service for you.

SocialGrapple has given TNW 5 Social Butterfly accounts for our readers. To be in with a chance to win please leave a comment saying why you would like to use it along with your Twitter ID.

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