Crowdbooster (discontinued) vs. Iconosquare

It is a great tool if you are time and resource-strapped and need assistance in expanding the reach and use of your social media platforms. It is also more beneficial to use if you are a marketing agency. Though you can use it as an individual or individual organization, it might be too much of an upfront set up cost to make it very useful long term.

Incentivized

A good match for someone looking into Iconosquare would be a social media manager looking to streamline their analytics process. It is for someone who may be pulling these numbers manually and wants a centralized location to pull numbers across platforms. Iconosquare also allows you to schedule your content, which provides another one-stop shop. Where it would be less suited is someone who may not use more than one social platform.

Incentivized

• Timed social media posts - Crowdbooster provides the opportunity to schedule social media posts allowing you to work on other important social media tasks.
• Simply beautiful tracking - There are millions of ways to measure social media impact. Crowdbooster offers the most important and relevant measurements in simplified charts..
• Great UI - Crappy UI = crappy experience. Crowdbooster's UI is easy to navigate. It won't take months to learn where all the buttons are.

• Provides in-depth analytics on engagement.
• Provides in-depth analytics on consistencies among your follower base.
• Provides insight into ways to grow your followership and refine your content.

Incentivized

• The ranked order of twitter followers and the number of "tweet impressions" did not help that much. Those "tweet impressions" were not really an estimate of how many people were actually reading my tweet. It was simply a sum of followers of the person retweeting a tweet and the sum of all followers from a subsequent retweet of the initial retweet. All this told me was the best case scenario I could expect if ALL followers of a person that retweeted saw my tweet. This is not a true measure of "twitter footprint" – since the “signal to noise” ratio in Twitter is very low.
• There was no system in place to track "clicked links" for links embedded in tweets and/or facebook wall posts. Hootsuite did a good job of this – but only for twitter.
• The list of recommended times to tweet were always "on the hour" (i.e. 10 a.m, 1 p.m.). Never were the times ever at "half past the hour" etc. An independent study that I did on my own using Google Analytics (and campaign links using google's URL builder) helped me determine that my optimal "Tweet time" during the week is 3:30 p.m. ET. More importantly, the recommended times seemed to be roughly the same on the weekends - which I find strange given that social media behavior does change on the weekends.
• Occasionally, in my facebook ranked table of "loyal fans", I would see people in there that had not "liked" or "commented" on a post for months at a stretch and the "look back" period of the table was only around 7 days or so. Hence, I occasionally had to question the accuracy of that table.

• Only accesses Facebook and Instagram analytics - no other platforms
• Does not separate paid and organic metrics
• A lot of features you need to pay extra for

Incentivized

Simple to use and a great value for what it offers. It has a simple but clean interface and it provides fantastic historical data you can use to measure your efforts online. By using a tool like Crowdbooster, you can see what is working with your audience and what isn't. From there, you can start tweaking your strategies

I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use. The information is laid out cleanly, and the most important information appears at a glance on the home page. However, I have worked with other users who had a hard time switching between platforms and identifying where other information was buried. It's not always clear that something is a clickable button! The option to export results is also a bit buried, and not integrated with the date range option.

I do not think it is as supported as it once was when it first arrived on the social media scene. It is an older platform whose main functionality may have already ran its course.

Incentivized

We never had a problem with customer support, nor really needed it. The UX of the site was easy to follow and simple to use.

Incentivized

If you can demo a free trial, that is definitely the best way to see if this will fit your program's specific needs.

Crowdbooster was cost effective and provided an intuitive, easy to use interface to generate reports quickly and easily. I felt some of the other options were priced either similarly or higher, and were more complicated to use. I was really looking for a solution that was flexible and that would grow with our program and staff.

Like other social media management platforms, Iconosquare has many similar features that allow for better Instagram management and monitoring. I'd say that for brands with a large focus on Instagram, or those looking to catapult their Instagram profile, Iconosquare is for you. For those looking for more robust social media management platforms that include other channels, Iconosquare might not be the platform for you.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency. I am able to generate useful snapshot reports in seconds. Particularly useful when you need answers fast (such as on a phone call).
• Peace of mind. I am able to compare the data in Crowdbooster to what is exported from Facebook and Twitter.
• Quicker, simpler evaluation of results. I am able to more easily compare impressions with engagement data to see what is working, and what should change. Particularly useful in day-to-day analysis.

• It helped to better guide our content on Instagram.
• Iconosquare allowed us to track our IG Stories analytics, which surprisingly few social analytics platforms can do.
• Iconosquare is a great tool to use when you get last-minute fire drill asks about Instagram performance and data.

Incentivized