You have done your research where your customers and prospects are? You have made your Social Media Strategy and have set up all the necessary platforms? Than the next thing on your list should be research/monitoring. This is the foundation to any Social Media Strategy. You have to understand and know what is said about your company, your competitors and who your influencers are before you start engaging in Social Media.
There are many free and paid tools and depending on your resources, capabilities, and budget there is one for every company. In my quest for the perfect Social Media Measuring tool I must say that I haven’t found the perfect tool (yet). But with a combination of several tools you’ll come a long way! Here is a list of my favorite tools currently out there.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
Hootsuite is a great free tool for monitoring social media, particularly if you have a larger amount of people using the same profiles. It offers much the same functionality as the likes of CoTweet, but has a better analytics tool. The site analytics offered through the site allow you to see profiles for different sites, making it an efficient way to monitor your activity. You might want to consider going for Hootsuite Pro which among other things adds influence scores, Facebook insights and Google Analytics.
BoardReader is one of the best free easy to use forum search engines around if you have a real interest in finding out what people are saying about you in forums, with a view to interacting. You can group search results by time and either view an overall trend in forum mentions, as well as drilling down into individual results to see mentions.
Google Alerts is free and can be used as a buzz monitoring tool now that Google is including conversations in its index. Google’s now indexing Twitter conversations and posts on open profiles and fan pages on places like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Radian6 is to my opinion the best (paid) monitoring tool in the industry at this moment. It does not come cheap, but it totally makes up for it ones you see the results. This tool gives you a lot of insight into the conversation currently happening around your brand and includes sentiment analysis (!). It also allows workflow assignments to attend to conversations you find relevant to with regard to your strategy. That said it does take up a lot of your time to manage this tool and getting the analysis you want. You might want to consider outsourcing this.
Social Media Influence tools
Kred is perhaps not as extensive as Klout (less networks), but definately more transparent. If you have a Twitter account you will have a Kred score. This score consists of two parts: your influence and outreach score. Your influence score is a measure of your ability to inspire others and is based on how often your tweets are retweeted, how many new followers you are gaining, and how many replies you generate. Your outreach score is measured in levels and is a reflection of how generous you are with retweeting and replying to others.
Social Bro is my favorite free Social Media tool for measuring influence. Since the integration with PeerIndex it shows your Influence score. It lets you browse your Twitter community by filtering your Twitter followers, and those you follow. It shows you your most influential followers, your unfollowers, low influence followers, inactive followers, people who are not following you back etc. As if this was not enough, today SocialBro introduces Real Time Analytics. The new dashboard shows which users are online at the present time, how many followers they have, what language they speak, and what apps they are using.
Social Media Research tools
Google Trends is a free tool from Google that you can use to spot trends happening currently in the world. It shows the hottest searches currently going on and gives you the possibility to drill deeper into these trends.
Google Insights let’s you choose the terms you want to compare in trending. This can be helpful in discovering if one word is used more than another, or perhaps one person is more popular than another. It gives you a nice country breakdown of the popularity as well.
It is still early days, but at this moment the perfect Social Media Measuring Tool, does not exist (yet). But with the tools described above you will come a long way!
More Reading
Social Media: Who is Responsible
Guide To Twitter – Tips for Small Businesses
How to Build a Social Media Strategy… And Why?
9 Drivers Of World Class Brand Sociability
6 Reasons to Start Blogging
I’m busy reading ‘Social Media Metrics’ (http://tinyurl.com/7utb7zs) by Jim Sterne (www.twitter.com/jimsterne), he looks into this area in some depth. I’ll share my thoughts on my blog.