Unmetric has unveiled its new Agency Platform, a way to let agencies see how brands stack up against the competition on social media. Unmetric, which calls itself a social media benchmarking company, has clients including Subway, Citibank, Campbell’s and Suncorp.
Unmetric gathers data from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. The original product, released in April 2012, was created with brands in mind. It has been restructured as Unmetric Agency Platform to better match agencies’ needs and work flow. It lets multiple users monitor the brands and easily add or subtract them from the monitoring.
Agency users can chart the number of posts made on a topic by various brands and the resulting engagement, or find the most engaging post on a topic. They can access unlimited historical data for any of the brands they choose to monitor from the date it was added to the database.
Using the SaaS application, they can, for example, chart the number of posts made on a topic by various brands and the resulting engagement, or find the most engaging post on a topic. They can also see the average response time on Twitter, information that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of a company’s use of Twitter for customer service.
“You can learn best practices not only from brands in your competitive set, but also brands from outside your sector,” says Jay Rampuria, head of sales and marketing for Unmetric.
For example, many brands are still learning how best to use Pinterest, Rampuria says. By looking at the leaders on Pinterest, they can see how Whole Foods or Lowes succeeds on the platform.
In addition to monitoring existing clients, Rampuria says, agencies are using Unmetric for new business development. The service can uncover gaps in a company’s social media profile, for example, if it’s a leader on Facebook but a laggard on Twitter, and pitch the prospect on improving the Twitter presence.
Digital marketing agency Zocalo Group has been an Unmetric customer and made the switch to the Agency Platform. “Our whole business is making sure that our brands are not just the most talked about but also the most recommended,” says Paul Rand, president and CEO of Zocalo Group. “Brands are now expected to find ways of having ongoing and open engagements with not only consumers but other people who matter to them. Social media is just some of the tools that allow us to do that.”
According to Rand, Unmetric and other social media measurement tools are an indication of the evolution of social media measurement, following the initial rush to simply accumulate as many fans or followers as possible.
These tools, he says, let agencies and marketers find out whether people are actually talking about a brand, recommending it and giving it feedback.”
In the case of Zocalo Group, which aims to increase recommendations for its clients, Rand says, “If we can find out why someone recommended a brand and get more of that happening, tools like Unmetric can play a centralized role in your marketing and even in how you go to market.”
He says that Unmetric lets him understand what clients’ fans like and engage with, so they can do more of it. It offers the same insights into clients’ competitors. He adds, “I see it as a way that something we spent time doing manually, we have the ability to do more efficiently and effectively. It gives us another set of data to make sure that we are listening well and understanding what’s working.”