We’re excited to announce the release of an incredible new feature: Monocle. This feature allows you to understand your competitors, and your industry, in real time.
What you can gain from this new perspective:
- See which posts are trending in real time
- Identify quiet, and highly active posting periods
- Benchmark your posts against the competition,
and the industry, as it happens
How To Use Monocle
Monocle is broken up into 5 main sections:
- Quick Overview
- Overall Chart Analysis
- Pages & Post Details
- Topics in Real-Time
- Best Photos in Real-Time
We suggest that you open Monocle, select a Pod with either key competitors or industry pages, and leave it open to generate what’s being posted as it happens. When Monocle is active (open in your browser), our system takes snapshots every 30 seconds.
Monitoring overall activity within the Pod will give you an understanding of when users are consuming content, and what they are consuming. This is helpful in determining low periods of activity, so you know a good time to publish your brand’s content.
Pro Tip: If your brand typically dominates the competition, consider posting when your industry/competition is in a highly active period. This will potentially derail their content’s momentum, therefore giving your page even more exposure on the news feed!
Quick Overview
Overall analysis of Pod activity:
- Total Interactions
- Average Change
- Alive Posts
- Best Page
These four metrics provide context for how active the Pod is at the moment. Understanding how the entire Pod is being impacted provides an opportunity to see overall activity within the industry. Use this knowledge to identify quiet, or active, periods within the Pod. Depending on your brand’s strategy, identifying and then posting within these periods can be extremely advantageous.
Overall Chart Analysis
These graphs present a visual overview of the activity going on within the Pod. This section provides a wide variety of filters to narrow down into what you’re interested in the most. We often find that using Change In Values and Change Rate Per Hour provides unique perspectives of how the Pod is changing over time. Sorting (do this with the drop-downs below the graph), also impacts the Pages & Posts, as well as the Best Photos below.
Pages & Posts Details
This section allows you to sort, filter, and examine details of the individual posts for each Page. Hover over the content type to see a preview of the particular post. Likes, Comments, and Shares are listed beneath the content of the Posts. To the left of the Post is a tall and narrow stripe of color, this color corresponds to the line graphs in the Overall Chart above.
Topics in Real-Time
Using text analysis technology, we provide the most engaging keywords updated in real-time. Click on a phrase to filter Monocle to those particular posts. In some situations the keywords are relatively random, but in others the text analysis will nearly read like a news headline (see recent news example below). This is helpful to get textual analysis of the most engaging content.
Best Photos in Real-Time
Our favorite feature in Monocle is Best Photos. It provides visual analysis of the hottest content, as it happens. The filters enable you to sort the Best Photos by Total Engagement, as well as Changes In Engagement. Total Engagement will give you an idea of what is dominating over the past few hours, while Changes In Engagement will provide context to what is working within the past 30 seconds. Sometimes the same photo is trending across the Pod. The green box in the upper right hand corner of each photo represents the current filter that is being displayed, and it’s change in the last 30 seconds.
For example: if the filter is set to Change In Engagement, and a green box reads “3k” this means the photo has received 3,000 Engagements in the past 30 seconds.
Pro Tip: Sort by “Change In Score” to see how content is trending, relative to fan sizes.
Just The Beginning
We’re excited for the future of Monocle because of the wide variety of opportunities it presents for brands and marketers alike. We’re interested in hearing how you’re using Monocle, and what you would like to see in the future. If you’d like to see Monocle in action, try it with this free News Pod Preview. Feel free to drop any feedback in the comments below, or reach out on Twitter or Facebook.
