For every blog post, tweet, and Facebook update, you should ask yourself: Who is listening?
Without a comprehensive social media strategy, your message may be getting lost in the chatter. There are a number of tools that will help you monitor your online influence and, effectively, make the necessary adjustments to ensure your efforts are paying off.
Here are 10 free tools to help you measure your social media ROI. The basic features of each of these tools are free.
1. Hootsuite
Considered one of the top social media management systems, Hootsuite is a web-based dashboard that enables your business or organization to execute campaigns across multiple social networks. This tool helps you identify audiences, distribute targeted messages, launch marketing campaigns, streamline workflow and much more. It also provides weekly reports on your social analytics. Social network integrations include, among others, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Sometimes the best analytics tools are built into the platform, like Facebook Insights. After your Facebook page receives at least 30 likes, Insights can be applied to break down the metrics of your content. See how people discover and respond to your posts and use the anonymized demographic data to analyze trends and tailor your message.
By using Google Analytics you will have access to a wealth of strategic data across multiple venues such as ads, videos, websites, tablets, smartphones and social tools. The result is a complete profile of your potential customers and their needs. Learn, for example, how visitors find your site, what they like and don’t like, and what they technology they use to access the information.
4. TweetDeck
TweetDeck resembles Hootsuite but is exclusively focused on your engagements on Twitter. This real-time tracking and organizing tool allows you to customize your Twitter experience in one interface. You can manage multiple accounts, build timelines, and track hashtags, events, and topics.
5. SumAll
SumAll connects you to all the services you use in one interactive chart. SumAll enables you to monitor and measure more than 30 services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, PayPal, Google Analytics) – for free. SumAll is a great option for small and medium sized businesses who want to be able to monitor all of their platforms in one spot – and have reports delivered via email on a daily basis.
6. Twazzup
An ideal tool for those new to Twitter, Twazzup enables you to follow a real-time stream of updates about keywords of your choosing. The interface presents a clear look at your related real-time tweets as well as trending and user information. It also identifies the top influencers in your field.
7. IceRocket
Specializing in displaying the most up-to-the-second search results, IceRocket covers blogs, the web, Twitter, and Facebook. Find out who links to your blog posts and search the IceRocket database of 200 million blogs. Your monitoring results can be viewed on a single, easily digestible page.
8. Klout
How influential are you online? The so-called “Klout score” reveals your effectiveness on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Wikipedia, and Instagram. The company recently added business analytics to its list of services to assist users learn more about their online audiences.
9. HowSociable
HowSociable measures the impact of your brand across multiple social media platforms, helping you identify which one is the best fit for you. By analyzing the metrics of your presence on 36 popular social media sites, this tool produces a score between 1 and 10 to indicate the activity around your brand during a given week.
10. Addictomatic
Addictomatic is a straight-forward application to monitor your brand’s reputation and industry developments. Simply select your keywords and Addictomatic will scan a variety of platforms such as Google, Bing, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube and Flickr.