10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools
How is your company's social media presence affecting the bottom line? Check out these mostly free services that help gauge individual or company impact on networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Built into Facebook is Facebook Insights, which provides data on user interaction with your Page, demographics, and performance over time. Only Page administrators, application owners, and domain administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer. Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Facebook Platform applications and websites.
The key with any of these social media monitoring tools is using them to read between the lines. Some of these tools do it for you--connecting dots between hard numbers to draw conclusions--and some require you to do some or all of the dot connecting yourself. In fact, that's the basic difference between monitoring and listening. Monitoring is a matter of gleaning hard data; listening is taking that data and looking at it--over time--through the lenses that are relevant for your company. According to JoAnna Dettmann, co-founder of digital marketing firm tSunela, "By listening to what target audiences are saying, you have this unparalleled opportunity to respond to their comments and criticisms and make strategic changes based on this feedback. It is a 24/7 focus group, test market discussion and comment box rolled into one."
This list of social media monitoring tools is by no means comprehensive, but does provide some suggestions for (mostly)low-barrier-to-entry monitoring applications.
HootSuite allows users to monitor multiple social networks from a single dashboard and create customer reports from more than 30 supplied modules. Users can also incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics into their HootSuite dashboards. The Pro and Enterprise versions of HootSuite allow multiple contributors without requiring password sharing. The Enterprise version of HootSuite costs $1,499 per month.
Organizations can measure their clout with Klout, a tool designed to gauge individual and brand influence. Klout scores are based on how many people engage with the person/entity being measured, the probability of that person's/entity's content being shared, and the influence of that person's/entity's followers.
The free Social Mention scans ("across the universe") for mentions of a particular person or brand on blogs, bookmarks, social networking sites, news, video, and more. Social Mention rates the mentions on what the service calls Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach.
Raven Tools uses data from Social Mention to uncover links to your brand's mentions or any keyword that you specify. A positive, neutral, or negative rating can be assigned to each mention. You can try out Raven Tools free for 30 days.
Sprout Social lets users manage, monitor, and track their presence on social networks including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Social Reports provide messaging analytics, a drill-down into user activity and demographic information. Among many other features are separate tabs for Twitter and Facebook that let users capture data in a browser or export it to PDF. Message summaries break down updates into type and show how widely they were shared.
The free Twitalyzer is a Twitter dashboard that provides data about performance of individual Twitter accounts. Twitalyzer measures the impact of a Twitter account based on several (and I do mean several) factors, including impact, engagement, influence, clout, velocity, and signal. The metrics are clearly displayed and articulated, providing a wealth of information.
Unilyzer makes it easy to see which campaigns are working best on which social networks. Unilyzer retrieves data from a wide variety of social media platforms and analyzes that data using easy-to-read graphics. For example, Unilyzer will tell you which visitors are "sticking" and from where users are coming. Unilyzer also measures social media marketing efforts over time, tracking network size, growth rate, and referral visitors. A Uniscore determines the quality of your social networking presence in areas including quality of social networks and referral rates.
Google Analytics is kind of the mother of all monitoring platforms. As far as social network reporting, Google Analytics provides integrated reporting for the Google +1 button "out of the box." To track networks including Facebook and Twitter with Google Analytics, you will need to integrate the Google platform with each network button. Social Engagement reports allow users to see how content is being shared through social interactions such as Likes.
Twitter last month purchased social media monitoring firm BackType, developer of BackTweets. The BackTweets analytics dashboard will be offered free to current users, but the company has said it will not be accepting any new customers. The BackType team and technology will be integrated into Twitter. One to watch.
Twitter last month purchased social media monitoring firm BackType, developer of BackTweets. The BackTweets analytics dashboard will be offered free to current users, but the company has said it will not be accepting any new customers. The BackType team and technology will be integrated into Twitter. One to watch.
Built into Facebook is Facebook Insights, which provides data on user interaction with your Page, demographics, and performance over time. Only Page administrators, application owners, and domain administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer. Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Facebook Platform applications and websites.
The key with any of these social media monitoring tools is using them to read between the lines. Some of these tools do it for you--connecting dots between hard numbers to draw conclusions--and some require you to do some or all of the dot connecting yourself. In fact, that's the basic difference between monitoring and listening. Monitoring is a matter of gleaning hard data; listening is taking that data and looking at it--over time--through the lenses that are relevant for your company. According to JoAnna Dettmann, co-founder of digital marketing firm tSunela, "By listening to what target audiences are saying, you have this unparalleled opportunity to respond to their comments and criticisms and make strategic changes based on this feedback. It is a 24/7 focus group, test market discussion and comment box rolled into one."
This list of social media monitoring tools is by no means comprehensive, but does provide some suggestions for (mostly)low-barrier-to-entry monitoring applications.
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