Skip to main content

Export.ly helps marketers analyze social media data

Export.ly is a simple way to aggregate Facebook fan page activity, Twitter follower data, and Gmail contacts in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet filled with raw data and beautiful charts, graphs, and reports. This radically simple approach makes data easy to access and saves time building reports.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

With the limited data available directly from social networks, social media managers face major challenges when measuring social media and reporting insights to clients and stakeholders. There is some insight to be gained, but Facebook does not offer the full firehose of public user information and gathering the same data from Twitter can be quite costly. Facebook Fan Pages are a prime example of this problem. Facebook Insights offers little direction on fan page performance, forcing marketers to spend countless hours manually aggregating data and reports.

Recommended Videos

Export.ly has launched to solve this problem and help marketers easily export datasets that they can analyse themselves, which otherwise are very difficult to access. Export.ly is starting with three datasets:

1.) Twitter followers, friends, and lists from any account

2.) Facebook fan page comments and posts for any brand

3.) Gmail activity and contacts.

Data and reports are presented in the simplest, most flexible possible format – an Excel spreadsheet. With Microsoft Office installed on over 1 Billion computers, Excel is the de-facto business tool for analysis and reporting. Export.ly caters to this so users can start crunching social media data without learning complex new technologies. This saves time across the board.

Export.ly is the second product from Simply Measured. This builds on the success of RowFeeder, its social media monitoring tool. The functionality of Export.ly and RowFeeder are also available together in the core Simply Measured product suite for larger agencies and brands.

Laura Khalil
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Laura is a tech reporter for Digital Trends, the editor of Dorkbyte and a science blogger for PBS. She's been named one of…
What is Section 230? Inside the legislation protecting social media
social media on phone

A little known piece of legislation called Section 230 is making headlines after President Donald Trump's latest effort to repeal the legislation, demanding that Congress fold that repeal in with another round of stimulus checks, defense spending, and the massive bill that keeps the lights on in Washington D.C. It seems politicians are alwasy struggling to wrap their heads around social media and "Big Tech," a silly term for the technology giants that have defined the modern era.

It's not the first time Section 230 made waves, of course. Trump signed an executive order in May that targeted social media platforms and the content on their sites, aiming to remove the protections of Section 230 in the Communications Decency Act. By repealing Section 230, social networks would be legally responsible for what people post on their platforms. The law that protects speech over the internet has been around for more than 20 years, but has been targeted by politicians of both major parties, including Democratic president-elect Joe Biden.

Read more
2020 forced Big Social to address its flaws, but it’s too late for an easy fix
Trump Twitter

The phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fire" is an incredibly apt description of the plight of the internet's social media giants in 2020. Already grappling to settle into their increasingly large roles in democracy and culture, social networks like Facebook and Twitter suddenly gained an even bigger role in our daily lives as the coronavirus pandemic took hold. In the face of this extra pressure, they had no choice but to adapt.

While these forced adaptations were no doubt difficult for the companies involved, the resulting changes have arguably been good ones -- not only for individual users, but for the world at large.
Too many fires to put out
When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, social media was a natural fallback. People turned to their online networks for community updates, virtual hangouts, news, entertainment, and more. Giants such as Facebook and Twitter faced a fresh coronavirus-related “infodemic,” while at the same time, an urgent responsibility hung on their shoulders to police an influx of controversial political content from President Donald Trump and many others who were quickly racking up huge follower counts.

Read more
Practically every major social app has a Stories function now. This is why
instagram launches location stories to more users 1

When Snapchat introduced the ability to post disappearing text and media over half a decade ago, no one expected that a scruffy new startup’s headlining feature would end up consuming a row of space at the top of every other social platform in a few years. But that’s exactly what has happened.

Snapchat’s Stories has flourished into a social network staple, and now the world's biggest tech companies are clamoring to bake this breakout format into their offerings. Today, a familiar row of avatars sits above all else on some of the most popular apps. You can now post these ephemeral “Stories” on Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google (for publishers), and possibly even Spotify in the near future.

Read more