20 Tools to measure your Social Media Marketing

This is a very straightforward blog entry. I’ll first touch on the basic process to follow while using social media as part of your online marketing mix. Next, I’ll present a list of tools that you can use to measure the success of your social marketing media.

It’s as simple as that.

Process to measure your social media campaigns.

1. Determine the desired business result: What do you want from this exercise? More sales, more leads, more email sign-ups? Be clear about your end goals and state them upfront.

2. Identify and measure the social media activity leading to the result: Which social media platforms will you use to achieve the above business result. Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Twitter? Don’t fall into the trap of blindly going after the usual suspects. Make sure that the social network and your brand have a reasonably strong relevance and only then go ahead with implementation.

3. Report and analyze all such social media activity regularly: Use some of  the tools below to see how your brand or website is faring across the Internet. This will help you get a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

4. Tweak business results or shift resources to mediums that work, if necessary: If some of the social networks don’t seem to be working, then divert resources from them to the networks which are giving you results and helping you achieve your stated goals.

That’s part I. Here are some tools that can be used to measure your social media initiatives:

1. Addictomatic : A very cool (and useful) tool that provides you with an aggregate of your brand visibility across various social networks like Digg, Twitter, Bing etc.
2. Blogpulse: This is a Blog search engine that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. Contains a conversation tracker tool
3. Boardreader: This tool searches forums and message boards for information about your brand.
4. Buzzmonitor: A very useful tool in the form of a widget that measures the buzz your brand’s been creating on the web.
5. Compete.com: One of my favorite tools. This is an excellent site that provides basic metrics for any website or comparable websites. Don’t forget to check their blog for some useful analysis.
6. Facebook Lexicon: This will help you monitor the frequency with which your brands are being discussed on wall posts on Facebook
   
7. Google alerts: Here you can get email updates of your key search terms and brand mentions on the Internet.
8. Google insights: This tool will help compare search volume over time for your brand and your keywords.
9. Google trends: This tools helps you compare search trends for your business keywords.
10. Howsociable: Another ultra cool tool that provides you with your brand visibility metrics and calculates a social media score for your brand. Definitely gets a “two thumbs up” from me.
11. Newsflashr: Like Web Signal 2.0, it’s an RSS aggregator and will provide you with real time feeds from sites of your choosing. It has a neat search engine that searches the news for mentions of your brand.
12. Summize: This neat tool (which was bought by Twitter for $15M more than a year ago) helps you search for keywords in ‘tweets’ on Twitter.
13. Technorati: The master of all blog aggregators. A strong rank here does wonders for your website. It has an excellent search engine too.
14. Twingly: Yet another blog search engine.
15. Xinu: This tool provides a variety of metrics detailing the performance of your website.
16. Quarkbase: Get all the information you require about a website from this tool.
17. Website Grader: A neat tool from the HubSpot boys at MIT. Get some key website stats.
18. Socialmention: This is a real-time user generated content search engine.
19. Bit.ly: We’ve all used URL shorteners to post on Twitter. Bit.ly gives you more in terms of some basic analytics for your abbreviated urls on Twitter.
20. Backtype: Another brand visibility tool. I inserted it here because of its visually cool interface.

Additionally, there are other tools that you can use ( Like Yahoo Pipes which is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mash-ups using a visual editor.), but let’s be practical here. You only need one set of tools to measure the performance of your social media initiatives and along with that you require discipline and focus.

And, yeah, a little bit of luck!

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