Updates digest: data sampling and new pricing plans

Adding channels for brand tracking. Monitor influencers or competitors easily

Previously, Instagram monitoring was the same as gathering data from other sources. You had to create a query, and the YouScan algorithm discovered relevant posts and added them to the monitoring topic.

But what if certain accounts use different keywords, hashtags, or tags, and you still need to track their activity? Now, there is an easy option to do that. With the latest update, you can add any business account as a channel to track all of its posts. Even if those posts don't contain the keywords from your initial query, they will still be collected by the system. 

This feature is most useful for: 

• monitoring competitors

• tracking particular influencers

Let's take a look at a possible use case. Suppose your brand appoints a celebrity as its ambassador. Typically, such collaborations imply that an ambassador is not permitted to use competitor brands and, in particular, to post them anywhere. So when signing a contract like that, a company can add all the social media pages of its new brand face as channels in YouScan, to check if this person follows through on the agreements.

Below, you'll see what adding an Instagram account as a channel looks like in our system.

All posts from this page will now be collected to the topic, even if they do not contain the keywords listed in the query.

Summing up, the new feature allows monitoring such things as:

• other people's pages (e.g., competitors, influencers, relevant communities)  

• your page's tags in the photo description (posts and some comments to them)

• comments containing your page mentions

• your own Instagram stories

Broad topic analytics. Collect mentions of the whole industry

Often, our clients need to analyze not only the reviews of their products or services but also the entire industry. YouScan allows tracking social mentions on any topic, like banks, beauty, retail, etc. You can find more details about broad topics monitoring in a dedicated article.

However, when collecting such topics, brands may face such issues as:

• There are far too many mentions to analyze each one individually.

• The number of mentions exceeds the current pricing plan.

The new Data Sampling feature can help with both of these challenges. It's best for:

• marketing research;

• spotting market trends;

• brand tracking of competitors.

So, what is Data Sampling, and how does it work? When this feature is enabled, YouScan will not collect every single mention within the topic. Instead, depending on the settings, only a certain percentage of mentions will be collected - for example, every fifth mention, tenth, and so on.

You're probably wondering if the research findings will be accurate if not all mentions are analyzed. The answer is yes! Such an approach is not something new, as the same method is frequently used in statistics when analyzing large amounts of data.

Simply put, using this feature, you can analyze 300,000 posts instead of 3 million and get comparable results. Moreover, the larger your dataset, the more accurate of a result you'll get. 

Suppose you need to analyze all the trends in the restaurant industry. The number of mentions of this industry is more than 17 million per month.

YouScan will first suggest the amount of data available for collection in your pricing plan. This result, however, can be manually changed by specifying what percent will be tracked.

Sharing interactive dashboard links

We've already covered how custom dashboards can be used to visualize analytics. However, this feature has been significantly improved since then: users may now create a link to an interactive dashboard and share it with anyone, including non-YouScan users.

To illustrate this feature, we've prepared a dashboard on competitive comparison between Purina and Royal Canin. Now, it's possible to share it with all the stakeholders via a link. You may also apply filters to the dashboard and create a link to a second dashboard with different data. For example, you can filter data from the "social network" source for one department, while another team might need the data filtered by the "media" source, and so on.

New flexible pricing

We have updated the logic that formed the cost of using YouScan. Now, there are three pricing plans available: Listen, Analyze, and Innovate. Each is defined by the amount of data and features you intend to work with.

The key difference is that certain add-ons, previously exclusively available to higher pricing plans, can now be purchased without upgrading to a more expensive plan. They include the API usage, mentions collection by logo and text on images, visual analytics, additional dashboards, and such features as "Data sampling" and "Smart tags" (when data is automatically tagged using machine learning).

Also, users will now get access to free history collection starting from 2014. Moreover, the data will no longer be restricted to the analytical window: all collected mentions will be saved in the topic. This is handy for analyzing the dynamics of specific trends. For example, we have collected all mentions related to a healthy lifestyle over the past 3 years. It turned out that the number of discussions on this topic is decreasing.

So far, these are the most significant updates; we promise to keep you in the loop on the news. And if you haven't used social media listening before, request a free demo version of YouScan to see the system's capabilities in action.