Gear up for measurement

There are a number of measurement tools offered today. Some measure specific social web platforms while others measure analytics from a number of social applications.  Whether your budget is big or small there are free, low and high cost tools available. The key is to choose a tool that is right for your business and program/campaign and not necessarily the tool that is the most popular or the one that everyone is using.

When researching what is already being said about your company or brand or researching what social platforms your target audience is on, it may be worthwhile to start with a free tool. The outcome of your research may determine which analytic tool would be best to invest in. As your social web presence increases it may be worthwhile to invest in a program than can provide more insightful and accurate measurement data to better determine the success of your strategy or campaign.

The following are three free measurement tools that can provide value to measuring your social web program:

Hootsuite offers a web-based dashboard that allows companies to execute multiple campaigns across multiple social networks and provides custom reporting of analytics for each campaign. This tool helps companies manage all their social networks from one platform and provides real time view of campaign results.

socialmention allows you to create alerts muck like Google alerts that can be emailed to you daily letting you know when your relevant search terms have been mentioned in the social space. It aggregates user generated content into a single stream. 

Klout measures influence across multiple social networks. It allows you to know how you impact the people connected to you. Klout provides a score, a representation of your overall social media influence and can tell you how and what caused an increase in your score. Klout can also tell you what topics resulted in an increase of engagement.

Collective Intellect is a paid analytic tool not discussed in class. It not only provides number of mentions but insights into how to effectively listen, act and engage with your audience. They use a random sample of the social media data to expose relevant themes, terms, sentiments and influencers driving conversations.

These tools provide value in measuring the success of your social web program by tracking mentions, sentiment and follower growth and how you are influencing the influencers. They are also valuable in providing insight into what your competitors may be doing and what parts of their campaign are resonating with your audience. Lastly, they provide a real-time look at what parts of your campaign are resonating or not which can allow you to change the course of your campaign throughout in order to make it more successful.