Xaffo Application Provides Social Media Analytics for SMBs

Social media can provide small businesses with a wealth of information about their customers, which is what Xaffo helps them find.

As small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) increasingly turn to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to grow their businesses, they are in need of technologies that help them sort through the reams of data social networks can provide about their customers. To that end, Calcey Technologies, an online services specialist, released Xaffo, an application with a cloud-based social media analytics dashboard to provide SMBs with social media intelligence about the popularity of their Web pages and keywords within social media networks.

The platform, which monitors keywords, trends, conversations and sentiment analysis across a range of social media sites including Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit and Twitter, allows users to watch activity for selected sites and analyze visitor engagement. The service aims to help marketing and PR departments more productively plan, tailor and execute social media marketing strategies.

Xaffo finds references to a company€™s Wen content via the publicly exposed APIs of the social network providers. If a business updates the sitemap at any point, Xaffo€™s daily sitemap scan will identify the changes in the sitemap and update the URL list. The Facebook and Twitter sections allow users to integrate the company's accounts with Xaffo and monitor their conversations, attraction, most engaged users, keywords, sentiments and real-time tweets. A Watch List lets users track keywords for competitive analysis and trending.

The Xaffo application is built on tipfy, a Python Web framework, and is hosted on the Google App Engine. It uses OpenID so subscribers can log in using their Google, Yahoo or other mail accounts, and is available in four versions starting at $99.99 per month. Xaffo Professional monitors up to 100 Web pages, while the Business edition of the application monitors up to 500 pages and is pitched at PR and social media managers. Xaffo Corporate, monitoring up to 2,000 Web pages, is also aimed at PR teams as well as executives and vice presidents of communications or marketing. Finally, Xaffo Enterprise is pitched at C-level executives, and is available for Websites above 2,000 Web pages and provides customized analytics and reports.

€œSocial media€™s rapid rise in importance continues to leave many organizations trying to figure out how to get in on it and also how to best realize a return on their investment in time and resources,€ Mangala Karunaratne, founder of Xaffo, said in a prepared statement. €œToday, it€™s not only vital for organizations to engage in social media, it€™s vital to clearly understand the impact it has on your organization€™s brand and products. As such, organizations with a social networking presence must also have deep analytical intelligence. It€™s important that this data is simple to understand. It€™s also important that it be meaningful in terms of gauging how and how often your web content is being viewed, shared, discussed, and so on, within social media networks.€