One solution that may be a great alternative to fill this CrowdTangle gap is Sotrender.

Below you’ll find its description and key functionalities that’ll help you stay in the social media game.

Sotrender – a CrowdTangle alternative

For what purpose was CrowdTangle created?

CrowdTangle was mostly used by journalists, media professionals, and researchers working for various organizations, including nonprofit.

The most typical use cases of CrowdTangle were as follows:

• Monitoring social media posts performance
• Analyzing content engagement on Facebook and Instagram 
• Tracking content virality
• Discovering trending topics
• Monitoring competitor and influencer profiles

As you can see from the table above, Sotrender is capable of filling the CrowdTangle gap quite well. It can even surpass it,  especially considering that the replacement provided by Facebook – Content Library –

offers some of the same data from CrowdTangle but ultimately only 1% of the features. (source)

Content Library is said to be even less accessible and to offer fewer features and data than CrowdTangle. Not to mention the fact that sometimes it… doesn’t work at all. And, as with CrowdTangle, access is granted upon request.

Are Sotrender’s features identical to CrowdTangle’s? Of course not. However, it’s a close-match alternative, offering even more features and possibilities than the free Facebook-owned solution.

What does this mean for you and your company? It means you can gain even more insights that will enhance your social media presence and equip you with additional knowledge about competitors, influencers, and the whole market.

Sotrender – main use cases

Sotrender, as a social media analytics and reporting tool, is mainly used for:

• Measuring social media organic effectiveness
• Tracking performance (reach, engagement, and more)
• Monitoring top-performing content
• Benchmarking against competitors
• Tracking influencers
• Optimizing social media organic strategies
• Analyzing and optimizing Meta ads performance
• Generating reports, both paid and organic, for owned and competitor profiles

After talking to some previous CrowdTangle users, we’ve learned what some of the biggest pain points the app was solving were. 

These mostly concerned: 

• Tracking competitor performance
• Analyzing post types
• Monitoring top posts for both own and competitors’ profiles

Here is how Sotrender, as a CrowdTangle alternative, can fill this gap.

Post performance analysis

Sotrender lets you analyze top posts, and essentially all posts, published by a selected Facebook Page, Instagram profile, or LinkedIn profile.

First, in the Profile overview section, it will pull out the six top-performing posts within a selected period of time.

You can expand this section to see a list of all posts published in the selected time period. You can sort them by:

• The sum of activities
• The number of reactions
• The number of comments
• The number of shares
• Engagement rate
• Interactivity Index metric

(These metrics may vary depending on which platform you are analyzing: Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.)

You can also filter by video, image, text, or link posts to streamline the analytics process and increase its relevance.

Sotrender’s post analysis feature can be a great help in:

1. Identifying and tracking suspicious content, Pages and other entities
2. Fighting misinformation
3. Monitoring the most engaging content among selected communities

Content strategy analysis

To dive even deeper into post performance, in Sotrender, you’ll also find the Content Performance section.

It’s essentially a chart showing how each post category performed in terms of:

• Impressions: paid, organic, and viral impressions
• Engaged users
• Interactivity Index

(These metrics may slightly vary between platforms: Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.)

What’s important is that the names of categories are fully customizable – you can name them according to your needs, such as product names, departments in your company, service categories, etc. By doing so, you’ll be able to see which categories perform best and are actually worth publishing.

In the example above, you can see that content related to COVID had the highest number of impressions (though mostly paid impressions), while content related to Facebook Trends and other analyses had the highest engagement.

Using the Content performance chart is a great way to better understand your content performance and audience preferences, allowing you to adjust your posting strategy accordingly.

Competition tracking

Many CrowdTangle users relied on the app for competition tracking. 

Sotrender serves that purpose as well.

All you have to do is add the Facebook or Instagram profiles of your choice to the app, and you’ll be able to see various data about their performance. You can analyze each profile separately, or you can create a comparison group consisting of multiple profiles.

For the comparison group, just like for a single profile, you can also see a list of top posts.

All the charts in the comparison group are interactive, allowing you to explore them to discover even more insights and dive deeper into what interests you at the time.

Influencer analysis

In the same way you track competitor activities and performance, you can also track and analyze influencer profiles in Sotrender.

Simply add the selected profiles to our app and start analyzing their engagement, profile growth, and top-performing content. Review their previous collaborations with other brands to protect your brand reputation and assess their alignment with your brand.

Need even more insights? Contact us and order a custom Influencer analysis report.

Meta ads analysis

Even though analyzing Meta ads wasn’t possible in CrowdTangle, if you decide to use Sotrender, you can also take advantage of the Sotrender Ads module.

It will help you with:

• Analyzing your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger ads performance
• Generating summary reports
• Benchmarking your ad data (CPC, CPM) against the results of other advertisers
• Optimizing your ads with AI-powered Ads Optimization

If setting up paid campaigns is on your radar, make sure you also have all the necessary data about their performance at your fingertips.

Automated one-click reporting

Once you’re done with the analysis, you’ll likely want to summarize all your findings in a professional way and present them to your team, boss, or client.

With Sotrender, you can do that with ease.

Our automated reporting is a great time-saver. Within just a few clicks, you can have a report detailing the performance of each profile (or group of profiles). Just select the data you want to include, choose the time period, and your report will be ready within a few minutes. Along with PDF reports, you can also generate xls reports.

It’s also possible to set up recurring reports that will be sent to a specified email address on a selected day (e.g., every Monday or the first day of each month).

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App availability

To use CrowdTangle, a solution owned by Meta since 2016, professionals working mainly for media organizations or NGOs had to be granted access. This means that not everyone who wanted to use the app could do so.

Content Library, which is supposed to replace CrowdTangle (though apparently only to some extent), also has limited access.

In contrast, Sotrender is freely available. All you have to do is create an account and connect the profiles you want to monitor. Even during the trial period, you can add and analyze up to 30 social media profiles.

To maximize your initial experience with the app, you can also schedule a free demo with one of our experts. During this time, you’ll be able to discover all of Sotrender’s features and its full potential.

Even though CrowdTangle was free to use, it was not available to everyone. Sotrender is a paid solution; however, nonprofit organizations are eligible for a 50% discount on every package.

Given that Sotrender offers more features than CrowdTangle and Content Library (e.g., ads analysis, ads optimization, extensive benchmarking, and reporting), it’s worth the investment. Additionally, compared to other similar tools, its pricing is reasonable and attainable for the majority of companies and institutions.

Custom solutions and individual approach

Didn’t find everything you need in Sotrender?

What’s unique about our SaaS solution is that it’s backed by a team of experienced researchers and analysts.

Having worked for various brands and institutions, such as WHO, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Embassy in Poland, and many others, we have the capability and knowledge to handle even the most unusual and demanding data requests.

Some areas of our analytical expertise include:

• Misinformation
• Trends exploration
• Customer service analysis
• Competitive benchmarking
• Influencer analysis 
• Opinion and content analysis

Learn more about our offer and let us know about your needs.

We also offer API access to brands and institutions that have their own in-house data analytics capabilities.

Choose the best CrowdTangle alternative for you

When looking for a CrowdTangle alternative, keep in mind that it was a solution with not only limited accessibility but also limited functionalities. Switching to another social media analytics and monitoring software is an opportunity for you to stay ahead of industry trends and leverage data you didn’t have access to before.

Sotrender, with its extensive analytics capabilities, robust competitor tracking, and advanced custom solutions, is an option worth considering as a CrowdTangle alternative.

Feel free to contact us anytime if you have any questions regarding the application itself or our custom solutions.