SMToolbox: Grow Your Google Plus Engagement with Steady Demand

Data is great, but insights that allow you to improve your performance are much more valuable. In my view, successful tools have to give you more than simple data. This week in SMToolbox, we review Steady Demand Pro, a good example of a tool that goes beyond data monitoring to provide practical insights and constant prompts to help you improve your performance on Google Plus.

Why Google Plus Matters

Google Plus is far more than a social network. It is part of a much bigger ecosystem that involves search, authorship and authority. There is already clear evidence that Google Plus will improve your SEO. These benefits are driving an increase in Google Plus users, as there are now over 300m active users. The increasing adoption of Google Plus creates a virtuous circle: as the network becomes more valuable, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes. 

However, Google Plus has never been the easiest of platforms, and it took me some time to get my head around things. Hence, I was very keen this week to review Steady Demand Pro, which is a tool designed to make it easy to manage one's Google Plus page. Last week, Steady Demand founder and serial entrepreneur Ben Fisher gave me a tour of the new tool.

Ben and the team wanted to develop a tool that is easy to use and which provides practical insights to help people improve their performance on Google Plus. I am pleased to say they have succeeded on both counts, as Steady Demand Pro takes the management of Google Plus pages to a new level.

Monitoring Your Google Plus Page

Steady Demand Pro provides all the the monitoring data you would expect from a social analytics tool. When you first load your profile, the tool automatically pulls in the last year's worth of posts. I have briefly outlined below some examples of the monitoring data provided by the tool: monitoring engagement by post type, engagement by time posted and top sharers. You can also review this data both for your own page or your competitors' pages.

Understanding the tabs is important. Connections relate to a page level, whereas Engagement is at the post level. This helps you see what posts caused a rise (or fall) in connections or engagement. Below is the monitoring report for your Google Plus Page’s engagement by post type.

You can see quickly how well your different post types are performing and the relative proportion of plus ones, shares and comments. What Steady Demand also does is provide useful information such as the signal to post ratio. In this case, you can see that Photos have a much higher signal to post ratio than Articles. 

Below is the monitoring report for engagement by time period.

This report clearly shows you the peak time periods for engagement and the top 5 hours. It also provides you with a complete table for each hour of the day and the signal to post ratio. The audience for the Google page here is on the west coast of the US, whereas I am in London; hence you can see that the highest post to signal rate is 3am UK time.

Below is a monitoring report highlighting the top sharers of your posts.

The tool allows you to report on comparative time periods. Thus you can compare this month to last month, but also compare the last three months to the previous three months. All reports are available as HTML and as PDFs, so it makes reporting on Google Plus page a breeze. You can also share reports by providing read-only access via email to your clients or others on your team.  

Actionable Insights To Improve Your Performance

The real aim of the Steady Demand team is to ensure you are doing well and making the most of your Google Plus page. This is where Steady Demand Pro excels as a tool. It reviews your activity, then recommends various ways you can improve your performance.

The team at Steady Demand have developed a model of a perfect Google Plus post. This has three factors: the length of a post, the use of hashtags, and the use of mentions. Steady Demand’s research has found that you get more engagement on Google Plus if you include all three of these elements in a post.

Steady Demand Pro mechanically assesses each of your posts for these elements and gives each post a score from 0 to 3. To prove the improved performance of a perfect post is not just a hunch or supposition; Steady Demand provide a live feed of all the posts for your Page, showing the average number of signals per post and their mechanical score. See the example below.

Thus you can see clearly that in this case, perfect posts gain twice as many signals as a post without any of the three elements.

Steady Demand Pro analyses all of your posts for a specified time period and provides you with a useful summary, as shown below. The great thing about Google Plus is that you have a few days to go back and edit your posts, so you can try to improve them using the insights from Steady Demand Pro.

One of the features I like about Steady Demand Pro is the way it provides you with alerts. For example, if you have low engagement on a post it will alert you and recommend some changes you can try to improve engagement.

Steady Demand Pro also alerts you about questions you are asked on Google Plus. Sometimes I can get lost in Google Plus. I may see a notification, but if I don’t deal with it immediately it disappears and I don’t always remember to find it again. Thus I can miss things and forget to reply to people. The great thing about Steady Demand Pro is the reminders. There is a nicely named ‘lonely comments’ feature: if there is a comment on the thread that has not been responded to, it will remind you with an alert. It will also prompt and encourage you if you have not posted in the last 72 hours.

Free Steady Demand Audit

Steady Demand is keen to give back to the community and provides a free audit tool. You can type in your Google Plus page address and the audit tool will run checks on your page; it will also check if you have a +1 button on your web page (in Pro this is a constant check; if your button disappears through a web update you will be notified automatically). The audit also reviews the quality of your recent posts against the three mechanical checks. Following these checks, Steady Demand provides you with a free audit report. 

Summary

If you are serious about improving the performance of your Google Plus page, then Steady Demand Pro is the tool for you. The key benefits from my perspective are ease of use, clear monitoring reports and actionable insights and recommendations.

The personal plan is $12 a month for two profiles, and the business plan is $24 a month for 5 profiles. The Steady Demand Pro personal plan is for small businesses that can’t afford an agency, while the business plan is ideal for agencies who want to manage up to 5 Google Plus pages.

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SMToolbox: Gain a Competitive Edge with Insights from Rival IQ

Tracking competitor activity is a key part of any competitive strategy. However, keeping track of such activity, especially over many different social media channels, can be complex and time consuming. Rival IQ is a tool that makes it easy for you to monitor your competitors and to analyze comparative data. This week in SMToolbox we take a look at how Rival IQ helps you gain an edge by helping you understand your competitive landscape.

Rival IQ is relatively new tool. They recently raised almost $1m in seed funding from a number of high profile investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan, Seattle angel Rudy Gadre, David Cohen of Techstars and marketing guru Jay Baer. The tool aims to provide useful intelligence about the digital activities and successes of competitor companies quickly and easily.

The Rival IQ Competitor Landscape Model

Rival IQ allows you to create what it calls competitor landscapes. You simply start by adding your company and then adding the companies you compete with. The tool does assume you know your market well enough to be able to add your main competitors. If you need help, there is a feature that allows you to find similar companies; but when I tried this it didn’t work that well in identifying competitor companies, at least for me. However, most people will know their main competitors, so this shouldn't pose a big issue. 

Once you have set up your landscape, Rival IQ will crawl the competitor sites, accounts and bios to pull in relevant website and social media data from Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Rival IQ then provides you with tools and reports that allow you to analyze your competitive landscape.

For the examples in this review, I set up a competitive landscape for the elearning company Kineo and listed a number of their competitors.

Rival IQ Reports and Tools

The reports and tools in Rival IQ are grouped under the menu headings above. I have highlighted below a number of the key reports available with example screenshots.

Competitive Landscape Overview

The landscape overview reports provide an overview of your social media performance relative to the competitive landscape you have identified. The report below shows how Kineo compares to the average of the competitors that I added.

Top Social Content

The top social content reports, which enable you to analyze the top 50 posts on your social media channels across your competitor landscape, are very useful. Below is the top social content report for Kineo for Twitter. I have blanked out the names of the competitors, but you can see how competitor A had 34 of the top 50 tweets, and Kineo had 5 of the top 20 tweets, and the highest ranking Kineo tweet was 6th.

You can run different social content reports, such as the top 50 most commented Facebook posts or top 50 most shared posts across your competitor landscape.

Market Positioning

The positioning reports allow you to quickly do side-by-side comparisons with your competitors. You can see how your competitors optimize their websites and their keywords in the homepage title, meta description, and keyword tags. Below is a comparison of homepage meta descriptions.

Whilst this is publicly available information, you would have to collate it from various sources. Rival IQ makes it easy to do comparisons of content copy and meta tags. You can also quickly compare competitor social bios from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ social accounts. Using these comparison tables you can develop your understanding and insights about how each company positions itself. 

You can also produce a number of other comparison tables to compare, say, domain authority, numbers of followers, and so forth.

Monitoring Competitor Changes 

One of the nice features of Rival IQ is the way it keeps track of changes, which you can receive in a weekly email. This will alert you, for example, to changes in a competitor’s meta description or Twitter bio. Below is an example.

You can set up parameters within Rival IQ so that if something significant happens, such as an increase in followers or an increase in engagement, you get notified automatically. So you don't have to worry about missing your competitors' significant social media moments.

Summary

Rival IQ gives you a good overview of your competitor landscape quickly and easily. It provides very useful reporting on social media activity in particular. The tool provides you with information and analysis tools that help you draw insights from the data. I suspect for many people the change notification and monitoring reports will be particularly useful.

I think the tool could provide more value by going beyond the information that is currently included; for example, to look at the most shared content or the influencers that share and amplify a competitor’s content. However, if you want to keep an eye on your competitor activity; compare your performance and positioning; and see when they change their messaging or run significant campaigns, Rival IQ is a great competitive analysis tool.

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