Last week I reviewed the free trial version of Actionly, which provides social media monitoring and measurement. The free trial version is limited to only providing results for one keyword search and only connecting to your Twitter account. When they read my review, Actionly gave me access to all the features so I could see what was available to a paying user. After letting it chug on a week’s worth of results, here are my thoughts….
How Actionly Works
Check out last week’s review to get an overview of how Actionly works. A paid version lets you connect to Facebook and monitor up to 15 keywords (instead of just one).
More Measurements & Monitoring
The paid version certainly gives you more information than the free trial. However, Actionly still is not picking up my own Google Buzz posts, and the Flickr results are empty even though I (as sazbean) have a Flickr account. The News results are also empty, but I’ve noticed that Google seems to filter blog posts out of it’s news feed results (blog posts are where most of my results are).
Facebook results are, unfortunately, very limited. This appears to be a limitation of Facebook’s own search interface which doesn’t seem to show results from Facebook pages, which should be public.
Influencers
Knowing your influencers online can be extremely important to your overall strategy. These are the people who are more likely to amplify your content and marketing to a wider audience. Unfortunately, Actionly just has a list of all the people who have tweeted your keyword, organized by number of followers, which only shows up for the first three (possibly a limitation from Twitter’s API). While true influence would be measured based on the power of the people following a person, instead of just the number following, this information could still be useful if you could order it based on the number of tweets/mentions. Then, at least, you’d know who was talking about you the most.
Overall Thoughts
Actionly does provide trending information based on keyword and source which is difficult to find in a social media measurement tool that is reasonably priced. I think there could be some very valuable information available if you had more ways to order and interact with it (influencers, for example). Actionly does provide some functionality for responding to mentions, but this isn’t nearly as robust as applications like HootSuite. While I really like the trending results for mentions, I’m able to get similar results from Topsy for free. Unfortunately, Actionly’s usefulness seems to be ham-stringed by the results provided by Facebook (and possibly Twitter and Google Buzz).
What do you think?