If you’re anywhere near as nerdy and stats loving as me, you’re going to love Export.ly. It is generally pretty difficult to get stats about a lot of social media and e-mail content – most of these services were developed for personal use, not for the range of business and marketing services that it’s become a tool for. Because of this, the sort of intense analytics that you can get for websites and about ad revenue are much harder to pinpoint for Twitter, Facebook and Gmail.
This is where the genius of Export.ly comes in, focusing on those three sites, it gathers data and, rather than having to try to aggregate data for yourself, the program exports simple spreadsheets filled with all kinds of data and graphs. For your Twitter feed, for example, it will download the location and timezones of your followers, the number of tweets, website URL and a host of other thing. You’re also given a complete list of followers with their names, URL, most recent tweet, and figures on their pages as well – perfect for use in finding other potentially interested customers.
Even better, for small businesses, Export.ly is free for small quantities of data – meaning start-ups with only a little information to analyze can do so for free and others can try it out before committing to paying. I used the free site to analyze my own pretty small personal Twitter feed (@ashleyfmiller), Facebook Fan page and Gmail account, and I can see how it would be colossally useful for businesses. For example, I receive almost 3 times the number of emails on Tuesdays than I do on any other day of the week. Why is this true? What could it mean? I’m sure I could use that information, somehow… Excuse me while I go play with numbers.
