PeopleBrowsr, the online dashboard for tracking the social web (previous coverage) is today leaving alpha and moving into beta. Although many people use the app for tracking Twitter, it’s actually capable of tracking a ton of the top web properties including Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and even RSS feeds. You can also use the app to update multiple networks at once.
The PeopleBrowsr app isn’t for the fainthearted, but rather for power users looking for a centralized dashboard for managing the entirety of their social media workflow. In fact, the service was built more with the needs of brand managers, social media marketers, and other customer service professionals in mind than it was built for the casual everyday user.
Why Brand Managers May Like this App
There are several business-oriented features that will appeal to those whose job it is to follow the conversations surrounding their company and/or brand. For example, PeopleBrowsr lets you manage multiple usernames in one dashboard and lets you follow people “anonymously” – meaning you can track them without them knowing that you track them.
As with the similar Twitter-focused app TweetDeck application, PeopleBrowsr lets you add people into groups for easier tracking. But in this case, those groups can be created around various keywords or hashtags, too. You can then share the groups with others – such as the other members of your team. Those groups can be public, private and shared, or completely private.
Of course, like any good conversation-tracking client, PeopleBrowsr offers a social media search feature which lets you filter search results by location, groups, specific individuals, posts containing links and sentiment associated with keywords. Those results can be sorted by number of followers so you can easily see what the more influential users are saying versus those with more limited social graphs.
PeopleBrowsr also offers a set of tools designed for brand managers and communication and service professionals. One such tool is the campaign manager which lets you set up response templates for replying to users on various services. You can also flag updates, mark items as “to do,” prioritize items, assign them to others, manage them, and even add private notes and comments.
A built-in address book can help you manage your contacts or you can use the service’s Plaxo integration instead.
Finally, reports and statistics are made available on a number of areas including followers, following, DMs, @replies, keywords, followers not following, following not followers, recent followers, retweets, and more.
Other Ways to Interact: Adobe AIR App or Email
If you would prefer to interact with the service via a desktop application, you can. As of today, there’s also an Adobe AIR app version of PeopleBrowsr available which offers all the same features as the online version.
If you tend to live in your inbox, you can have PeopleBrowsr email you copies of @replies and direct messages as your tracked keywords appear. You can then just reply to the message via email and PeopleBrowsr will post the @reply or direct message for you.
