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.
