This article was published on June 12, 2011

Twenty Feet: The social media tool you’ve all been waiting for


Twenty Feet: The social media tool you’ve all been waiting for

If you are like me and use social media on a regular basis you are probably obsessed with stats from your various different networks, sites, blogs and sharing tools. Finding out all those stats is usually quite a manual process of logging in and out of several accounts and most people I know check their Google Analytics account about 10 times a day. I’ve always craved a dashboard that would pull in all that information in to one central hub where I could get a quick overview of all the my activity online and Twenty Feet has just launched that tool.

You’ll need to do a little bit of manual work at the start connecting up all your various accounts but that should only take about 10 minutes and once done you’ll have simplified your life significantly and you can kiss goodbye to all the logging in and out of accounts again. It’s a great new service and the level of functionality and customization for a site still in beta is very impressive…

Google Analytics

Twenty Feet goes into a good amount of detail with Google Analytics and will give you a good look at traffic for the last week and some of your other headline stats. If you need more detail on tracking you’ll still need to log into Google Analytics itself but it’s a perfect way of checking for an unusual spikes in traffic etc.

Facebook Pages Info

This is essentially the same data that you can get within Facebook itself but the beauty here is that it is all built in to one dashboard along with all your other stats. You can also add multiple Facebook accounts, which is especially useful for agencies and brands managing a few pages.

Twitter Stats

The best thing about the Twitter stats is that it shows how many Retweets and interactions you are getting across your various Twitter accounts (it also lets you track multiple accounts). The stats here are simple enough but it does help give you a good overview about just how your content is spreading online.

Bit.ly

It’s very hard to keep a track of links you share online but if you use Bit.ly you can see exactly what happens to all your links. You’ll have to set up an account on bit.ly itself but once you do you can see every single click on the links, where those clicks happened, when they happened and watch out for any spikes of useful content you might have shared.

YouTube

YouTube videos have a funny habit of blowing up and getting a load of views, comments or ratings without you even noticing it because most people don’t spend much time looking at their stats there. With this tool within the dashboard you will pick up spikes in your videos within hours. [Also, be sure to check out our 20 Slick YouTube tips and tricks you need to know.]

The Verdict?

Once all the work has been done and you have tailored all your reports to be delivered the way you want them you can simply add them into your dashboard so as soon as you come back to the site you don’t have to go flicking around your various social media statistics. It is streamlined, simply designed and gives you an instant snapshot of what you are looking for. It’s data presented in a way where you can quickly see spikes of activity and choose to do something about it if needed.

It’s a great idea and something that many of us have been crying out for now for a long time. Although the content is excellent the site is still very slow at the moment and it shows that it is in BETA but you can expect that to get better over time. It takes them a while to get the feeds at the moment but that will hopefully get faster. If they do sort out the speed issues then I can see people using this on a daily basis because it will save everybody time and cut out all that flicking between accounts.

You can check out Twenty Feet here. And here is a video with the founder that I spotted on Scoble’s blog…

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