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Let’s face it, it is not possible to engage with thousands of followers on a one-on-one basis every day. Yes, you can send general messages and thank the re-tweeter and people who mention you; but the more people that are following you, the more time it takes and pretty soon it becomes impossible to keep up to date.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way of monitoring your Twitter community so that you could see at a glance who was engaged; review who your supporters and top influencers were and where to start building relationships? How much time would it save you if instead of spending hours you could whizz through your Twitter in 10 to 15 minutes a day?

Well, say hello to Commun.it! Commun.it is the latest relationship management service for Twitter. Commun.it is the first solution that fuses community management, CRM and lead generation in a way that enables business-focused relationship management on Twitter. What makes Commun.it stand out from the crowd is that it does not just tell you who is talking about you. Commun.it can show you in an instant your lifetime interactions with a Twitter user regardless of whether or not you follow each other. That is how many times they have mentioned, re-tweeted on message you since they joined Twitter: a great way to find potential connections and customers. If people are talking about you, then you have an instant warm lead to follow up on.

Twitter’s in the moment magic, i.e. its ability to show you the latest conversations in your stream is also a drawback when it comes to trying to manage your engagement because it treats all status updates as equal. Consequently, it gives the same visibility to the people who are your top influences as it does to those who randomly mention you or the bots that are deliberately targeting you for spam . This makes it difficult to prioritize your efforts or evaluate the context in which the tweets are sent i.e. how influential is the person talking about you and how often they have engaged with you in the past?

By turning the streams of information flowing from your feed into a relationship orientated dashboard Commun.it:

1. Analyses your relationships and helps you target those that are most relevant to your brand or community engagement objectives.
2. Homes in on your high value connections, i.e. those that are sharing your content; driving awareness about your brand by talking about you and spreading your words by re-tweeting you. These members are your top influences and Commun.it conveniently ranks them over time so you can see who has been the top influencer(s) for the week, month etc.
3. Not only does Commun.it, show you where to focus your attention; it also provides on the page, actionable insights. In other words, once you know who is talking about you; at a click of a button you can thank them, reply, re-tweet or send them a direct message. You can even see if you have been inadvertently ignoring them as Commun.it also shows you any unanswered conversations. Again these can be quickly responded to from the dashboard by a single click.

Appearance wise; the interface is easy to use. It takes only a moment to get to grips with the navigation; there is a helpful annotated screenshot walk-through and once you get used to the main view whizzing through the information is a breeze. On the minus side, one gets the feeling that the basic look would benefit greatly from an injection of investment to give it the sort of high quality end user finished we’ve now come to expect from top products.

The Home page offers 5 easy to understand matrix’s to focus on:

Build Relationships: which in addition to identifying the numbers of high valued members (i.e. most engaged, supporters and influences). You also have the ability to tell Commun.it who you want to focus on by creating your own groups or starring individuals.

Manage: Using its unique algorithms to analyse who you engage with, Commun.it suggests people to follow, unfollow and alerts you to people who have recently stopped following you.

Monitor Engagement: here you have the opportunity to set up the items you wish to monitor in Twitter conversations, e.g. your website, other people.

Discover New Leads: using search terms you can see who is also talking about your keywords.

For each individual identified Commun.it will show you their followers; their lifetime engagement with you; how many times they mention things you monitor as well as rank them as an engaged member, influencer or supporter.

With so much data its easy to see where to put your focus. In addition, to save you being overwhelmed by statistics, the Advanced tab provides analytics over time and detailed engagement reports. The one drawback is that you can’t print them from the system and the usual right click print provides a poor substitute. Reports are periodically e-mailed to you. However, I wasn’t able to find out how to set this up or manage the frequency they are sent. It seems that you have to pay for the corporate version at $299 per month in order to access these facilities.

Our verdict

Overall Commun.it is an easy to use monitoring tool that delivers what it says. It is a great tool for effectively managing your Twitter engagement, providing the user with the critical information required to develop profitable relationships. However, it is limited to Twitter and in today’s multi platform social media environment, if it wants to play with the big “boys”, Commun.it will have to considerer expanding to cover at least the market leader’s i.e. Facebook and Linkedin.

You can try Commun.it for free as they offer a free version limited to a single profile and 100 engaged members. These features are unlimited in the Business version I tried which is very good value at $29.99 per month. You can access your Commun.it free plan here.

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Lilach

Founder at Socialable Ltd

Lilach Bullock is passionate about getting tangible results using social media. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers. She's the co-author of "Images that Influence" (Number One in its category on Amazon). Lilach is consulted by journalists and regularly quoted in newspapers on social media related matters, including (Forbes, Social Media Today, Prima Magazine, The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 5 Live ). A keynote speaker at business and marketing seminars. If you want excellent results, more business and better visibility you can can subscribe to Socialable newsletter here.

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