ThinkUp is a great little service for anyone who likes to track how they are doing on the social sites Twitter and Facebook.
Rather than relying on some arbitrary grading system like Klout, ThinkUp instead provides simple, clear feedback on what you are doing online and how people are responding to it.
There’s a web interface where you can log in and check out the insights ThinkUp has to share with you, or you can just rely on the helpful daily email.
Here are some examples of the feedback ThinkUp provides (click to enlarge them):
There’s value in ThinkUp for everyone, but I think particularly for people in leadership positions in organisations who are just getting started with a tool like Twitter, ThinkUp can act as a virtual coach, providing positive advice and insight on a regular basis to keep enthusiasm levels as high as possible.
ThinkUp does cost $60 a year to use, but I think it’s good value.
There is also a free version if you host your own – analogous to the wordpress.com/.org model. The free version came first, but all the recent development effort went in to the paid/hosted version which is now more advanced (or at least glossier), but their stated intent is to bring the two back into alignment fairly soon. Setting up self-hosted thinkup is about as hard as setting up self-hosted wordpress, and once done it just keeps going. And it supports multiple accounts, so you could easily have a single installation for a group of people, saving several lots of $60.
Oooh, good stuff. I did know it was open source but wasn’t sure just how usable it was in that form, if you know what I mean. Still, am happy to pay $60 to forgo having to maintain even more software… 😉