If you are serious about improving your ROI on social media networking activities then you should be using these smart and effective tools. These tools are real good at measuring the penetration and effectiveness of your brand on the social media arena.
First step is to decide what specifics you are looking for and then use the appropriate tools for extracting the best results. There are many tools available, but here’s our list of some good free ones that cover all types of social media channels like social networking sites, video sharing sites, bookmarking sites, blogs and forums. So try them out:
Twitalyzer
It comes up with a lot of metrics that measures your success on Twitter. Apart from showing the growth of your following in a graph, it gives you more useful information like, how engaged your audience is and how influential you are. It also gives you a snapshot based on the past 7 days of activity, with trending information available for the past days.
Trendpedia
Now check what the buzz is around in the blog world. Just choose your topic, enter related keywords and you are presented with valuable information like who’s discussing what, where, when and how. It also finds you articles that talk about your business, products, services and related topics; you can also track the topic’s trend line over a period of time.
HowSociables
It’s a free and simple way to track the visibility of your brand across all major social media sites. For a given brand name it searches and returns you a set of results from social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn etc. You can also receive timely updates on your social media presence to your email and also track your brand popularity.
Twitteranalyzer
As the name suggests it’s all about your Twitter statistics. You can track your followers and friends, their dispositions and what they write about you. You can see followers who are currently online, who retweets your messages, your follower’s stats, their habits and so on.
Socialmention
It’s a social media search and analysis tool that collects user generated content from across the web and delivers a single source of rich information. This immensely helps you to understand what the people around feel and talk about your company, your products and services. It also gives you valuable information like trends on new products, topics discussed on all popular social media sites and so on.
TimeTube
You can now track all YouTube videos that match a given keyword against a timeline to see when they were posted. It’s great help to track videos talking about your brand, related products and services and the time when they were posted in a chronological order. This can be of immense help to track effectiveness of your product line and its future enhancements.
BoardTracker
One of the most innovative forum search engines. If you are an active forums participant then you should be using this. It tracks messages and gives instant alerts, providing you quick and relevant searched information. It ensures that you never miss any related forum thread posted anywhere anytime.
TweetStats
In short it gives you a graphical representation of your tweet stats. It gives you various graphs by analyzing your tweets; it includes tweets per hour, per week, per month, tweet timeline and also the reply statistics. Other features include Top 10 Twitter Apps, Top tweets and so on. It’s the easiest way to get a complete overview of your analyzed Twitter activities.
SM2
Alterian SM2 is widely recognized by industry insiders as the leading Social Media Monitoring solution in the marketplace. As an SM2 Freemium user you can enjoy some of the features and functions of the Professional version, however there are many features like language filters, geo filters, real time alerts, workflow, sentiment analysis and advanced search options that are available only to professional users. Nevertheless, the free version is definitely worth a try for up to 1,000 searches.
