As mentioned last week, we're seeing a lot of content management systems rolling out their own, more robust analytics solutions and it caused me to wonder whether third-party analytics systems might be in peril. It's not just your CMS system however that is offering up better insights - a variety of software vendors are proving they have the virtual analytics chops to compete.
Topspin Media, a direct-to-fan marketing and retail software platform, has integrated with social analytics company awe.sm and released a new suite of features dubbed "Sharealytics." The feature enables users of the platform (namely musical artists) the ability to track the spread of their marketing widgets across Facebook and Twitter. The result is a greater understanding about the amount of traffic, as well as the number of signups and sales that results from fans sharing content online. According to Topspin, sharing from widgets into Facebook and Twitter drove an additional 10 percent of the total traffic to artist campaigns.
"We're excited that Topspin now shows artists just how powerful fan sharing on Facebook and Twitter can be," said Ian Rogers, CEO of Topspin. "Before now, users had no way to quantify a share on Twitter or Facebook. Now, Topspin allows users to see the number of shares, the amount of traffic created by those shares and the number of new fans acquired from the shares. You can see if Facebook is more effective for you, or if your time is better spent on Twitter. Over the coming weeks, we'll add the ability to track the direct sales driven by a Tweet, an e-mail or a Facebook post. No more guessing about the effectiveness of social sharing and direct marketing - it is time to measure social campaigns in dollars and fans."