Earlier this week, Twitter announced Brand Hub, a new tool within Twitter analytics that is essentially a native social listening feature built specifically for Twitter, and allows for data collection and analysis of brand activity and priority keywords/hashtags:
- Share of voice (competition, conversation)
- Influencers
- Demographics (age, gender)
- Geographics
- Etc.
All of these data angles are commonplace among the plethora of social media technology tools, both listening-specific and broader content management (Sprout). Brand Hub’s differentiator? From my initial analysis, the tool’s unique value comes from its detailed competitor benchmarking (at least for free), as well as the connection to paid media (at least for free).
The screenshot below showcases the “indicators to measure your brand” section on the right, which provides a number of qualitative brand attributes — such as “loyalty” — that you are able to benchmark against a competitive average. That said, the feature I believe to be most valuable down the road is the “saw ad” metric, highlighted in the red box:
Implications of the “Saw ad” metric
1. This provides insight into competitors investing in paid, and if so, how that compares to the average. This is important, as there currently is not much data on competitor paid social investment, especially in free native analytics.
2. While “saw ad” is pretty broad, I would imagine the sophistication of the correlation between paid advertising efforts and its direct impact on organic Twitter activity (conversations, engagement, etc.) will become more insightful and actionable over time.
3. This has direct implications to the social listening technology space, which is a small but crowded one. It’s comprised of solo listening platforms like Netbase and Sysomos, as well as originally content-specific platforms that have added listening features over time like Hootsuite and Spredfast. There will always be a place for holistic social listening technology that pulls in data from all sources, but if Twitter starts a trend among the major platforms to provide listening analytics natively, it will be interesting to see how the tech providers respond.
next steps
Brand Hub is now available to select large brand advertisers and medium-sized businesses in English-speaking countries. To get started, visit brandhub.twitter.com or log in to analytics.twitter.com and select Brand Hub. If you don’t currently have access to Brand Hub, reach out to your account team.
