Twitter Analytics: uberVU vs. Twitter Counter vs. Raven Tools

I’ve been on a hunt to find a viable solution for monitoring Twitter metrics and it hasn’t been as easy as you might think. There are many tools that exist — lots that are bad, some that are good, but I have yet found a Twitter Analytics tool that I can call “great”. After few weeks of looking around and testing, i’ve boiled it down to three products that are worthy of a closer look.

The criteria for my product search has been: 1) Depth of data provided 2) Accuracy of data provided 3) The ability to specify date ranges and 4)  Cost.

Here are the three contenders:

FIRST Contender: uberVU

Summary: uberVU provides analytics and reporting about conversations around your brand happening in the social web. It’s not a twitter-specific tool, but it does let you filter data relevant by platform. With the Basic account, you receive data for 5 keywords/brands you want to tracks.

Cost: Basic account $49.99/month (1 user, 5 searches), Plus account $179.99/month (5 users, 30 searches), Team account $399.99/month (15 users, 75 searches)

Pros:
– Ability to specify exact date ranges
– Filtering by: Platform, Language, Location, Sentiment, Network Size
– Export data to CSV files
– Pretty PDF reports
– Great way to get a general idea of your brand mentions

Cons:
– No data about followers/following
– No data about tweets/retweets
– Questionable data accuracy

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SECOND Contender: Twitter Counter

Summary: Still not sure how to best describe Twitter Counter but it’s a solution — part platform, part destination site, part statistics — all about twitter.

Cost: Pro Stats $15/month, Site Owner $25/month

Pros:
– Most relevant twitter metrics are included (followers, following, tweets, mentions, retweets)
– Graphic chart display
– Export data to CSV files (data is very limited)
– Compare metrics against two other competitor profiles

Cons:
– Not possible to retrieve data for exact date ranges
– No data about total reach of the brand
– No reporting

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THIRD Contender: Raven Tools

Summary: Raven Tools is a comprehensive tool set for researching, tracking and managing metrics relevant to internet marketing campaigns — from SEO, to email, to social media. The value here is that you get access to a lot of useful tools, outside of Twitter analytics, that might be helpful in other areas of online marketing. I especially like their link building features, pretty awesome stuff.

Cost: Basic $19/month, Pro $99/month (this is what you need for social metrics), Agency $249/month

Pros:
– Ability to specify exact date ranges
– Graphic chart displays with overlapping metrics
– Reporting
– Benchmarks for data sets (+/- %)
– Much more than just Twitter data

Cons:
– Not possible to extract twitter mentions data (they just give you a stream from social mention)
– Questionable accuracy on “reach” metric

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All three contenders have a lot of good things going for them and some obvious shortcomings. I certainly wouldn’t call any of them a clear “winner” just yet but one of them is pretty damn close to becoming an almighty twitter analytics solution.

Are there any other tools that you think can contend?