Kenyan Startup Unveils Low-Cost Social Media Reporting Tool

Kenyan new media focused company, African Laughter, has today unveiled a social media monitoring report service, Repute Daily Report, to enable companies already subscribed to its press release distribution service (PRAlerts) to monitor media reporting and social media comments on any named client or brand.

The company aim to help staff charged with building corporate reputations to identify quality control or customer care problems that may sometimes go unnoticed.

Ms.Jenny Luesby, Managing Director of African Laughter Ltd said;

“The service generates a detailed report of the client’s or brand’s online activity, the sentiment-from positive to negative, the ratio of Facebook to Twitter, the actual verbatim day’s posts naming the client and brand, as well as news headlines linking to any news items naming the client or brand.”

Current statistics indicate that over 2 million Kenyans are using Facebook and Twitter. Brand presence on the social media is also increasing with Safaricom’s m-banking platform M-PESA currently the top brand in the country on Facebook, with over 197,616 likes on its official page.

Similarly, Kenyans produced over 2 million tweets during the last quarter of 2011, according to The Portland Group. This put the country only second on the continent to South Africa, whose citizens created over 5 million tweets in the same quarter.

However, with increased social media use comes the challenge of monitoring and tracking comment or sentiment. “Repute Daily Report service helps solve the puzzle of monitoring by finding out who is saying what, and where the conversation is happening so you can respond appropriately,” said Ms Luesby.

“The web based platform filter and analyses information sources from across the media and social media to generate the daily report, gathering and analysing all online mentions, across news, blogs, Facebook walls and Twitter hashes, to generate a report that PR agencies can email or print to clients,” she said.

For PRAlerts clients, each Repute Daily Report service costs just Sh5,000 a month, payable as Sh60,000 for an annual licence. However, for any Repute Daily Report service commissioned and paid for by mid-December,  during the inaugural month for the new service, PRAlerts clients will be offered a further 35 per cent discount, equating to a monthly subscription of Sh3,900.

“We are also happy to report that the new Repute Daily Reports service launch comes as we continue to innovate and increase subscriptions to PRAlerts, now standing at 592 journalists,” said Ms Luesby.