Twitter is an extremely valuable tool for marketers and entrepreneurs. When it comes to connecting with customers and keeping up with trends and news in your industry, there’s simply no other network like it. The trouble is, how do you cut through all the noise to be able to focus on the people you really care about interacting with – your customers, brand ambassadors, leads, investors, and influencers in your industry? We’ve shared about Twitter list management tools before, which can help with this to some extent. But we’ve recently begun using a new Twitter management tool that might just put all others to shame: Commun.it.
Find and Connect with Your Most Engaged Supporters
Commun.it is a Twitter management dashboard with your “Prioritized Feed” as its central feature. And essentially, this is exactly what Commun.it does – prioritizes your Twitter world for you by identifying the most influential and engaged users, and pulling the most important tweets to the forefront. It shows you interactions you’ve missed since you last checked in, and generally helps you make sure you never miss an opportunity to engage with a key follower or influencer.
Commun.it operates on a freemium model, with a Pro version available for $9.99 per month (1 Twitter profile, 3 day limit on reports), and a Business version for $49.99/month (10 Twitter profiles, unlimited reporting and engagements). Here is an overview of the free version and some of the unique features this tool has to offer.
Prioritized Feed
At the center of your Commun.it dashboard on the Community screen is your Prioritized Feed, which shows recent activity and interactions. The panel on the right displays the top tweets that have been shared in your network so you can retweet or comment on the conversations that are most active. The tweets are ranked by importance based on the user’s engagement history with you and level of influence.
Commun.it organizes Twitter users into three categories, shown in the left sidebar when you log in to your dashboard:
- Supporters – users who share and retweet your content
- Influencers – users who have a high follower/following ratio
- Engaged members – users who interact with you more often than others
Your “High Value Members” are what Commun.it refers to as your “core community” of most engaged users, regardless of which of the three user categories they fall into.
Quickly Follow, Unfollow, and Greet New Followers
On the Actions screen of your dashboard, you can see a snapshot of your latest follower/following activity. The main panel shows Top Tweets again. Over on the right are suggested users for you to follow or unfollow, based on their engagement with you and their level of influence.
The bottom half of the screen shows you your new followers (again, ranked by level of influence and engagement history) so that you can take the opportunity to thank them. It even pre-populates a thank-you tweet for you, complete with hashtags. The good news is that you can change the tweet to say what you want, so you don’t turn into an automated thank-you-tweeting robot.
Be aware that utilizing this quick click-to-tweet function will add “via @Commun_it” to your tweet, and you can only remove it if you upgrade to their paid version.
Similar to the thanking new followers, the “Share the Love” box ranks your most High Value members and allows you to thank them with one click (again, with a shout out to @Commun_it that can’t be removed in the free version).
Limits to the Free Version …
Here comes the bad news: with the free version of Commun.it, you receive only ten engagements per week. An “engagement” includes a follow, unfollow, reply, retweet, or direct message. Umm, if you’re like us – you could have than many engagements in an hour. Or five minutes.
Commun.it offers a nice reporting functionality that could be very useful for tracking analytics and measuring engagement. The free version, however, lets you view data from only the past three days. (With Pro, you can see a week of data, and with a Business account, a month).
You can also view your Twitter lists on the Community screen under the “Group” tab, but much to our disappointment, there doesn’t seem to be any real list management tool available with the free version. Plus, the changes you make to your Groups don’t automatically transfer to your Twitter account – so the group feature is something you can only use within Commun.it.
Our honest review: While we are completely enamored with some of Commun.it’s features – like how it identifies the most engaged and influential users in your Twitter community – we found ourselves bumping up against the limits of the free version rather quickly. If you manage more than one Twitter profile and your accounts receive a high volume of activity, it is may be worth the upgrade to one of the paid versions.
Do you use Commun.it? Have you tried any other relationship management tools for Twitter? Share your experiences in the comments below, or connect with us on – you guessed it – Twitter.
