Social Media - You’re tweeting but is anyone listening?

Most organisations are investing in social media to some extent or another.  For some it’s the occasional tweet or Facebook update, for others, in-depth, cross-channel marketing campaigns, using a whole variety of social media tools.  But the same question applies to both - is anyone listening?  And if so, how do you know?

I recently went to an event, where the speaker asked who was using tools to measure their social media.  In a room of about 30 people, only 2 or 3 put their hands up.  It seems obvious that any marketing campaign should be measured, after all you need to know if it is providing you with any tangible business results, however, by the show of hands at that event, it seems that’s not quite what’s happening.

So, my question is, how do you know what is working for you and what isn’t?  How do you measure the success of social media?  After all, you could be spending valuable time and energy on social media without any idea of whether it is worthwhile or not.  

Top tools to help

Thankfully, there are many tools out there that can help you to monitor your social media activities, however, because there are so many to choose from, it can be difficult to know which one will work best for you and your organisation, so I’ve put together what I consider the top 5 free tools, and the top 5 paid for tools to give you somewhere to start.

Top five free

1. Hootsuite  
   This is a great tool that allows you to save time when it comes to managing all your social media accounts in one place: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. The weekly analytics reports and the excellent team management facility can be very useful when there’s more than one person handling the social media accounts.
2. Klout
   Using hundreds of variables, Klout measures your influencer score, showing who influences you and who you influence. Using that data, you can see what content influences the most people so that you may continue to post similar content.
   
3. Social Mention
   When you enter your company name or industry, Social Mention sends back an in-depth look at online sentiment, breaking it down to positive, neutral, and negative. It then lets you look at specific instances from blogs, social media, news, etc.
4. TweetReach
   TweetReach is the right tool for your business if you’re interested in monitoring how far your tweets travel, as TweetReach measures the actual impact and implications of social media discussions. It is a good way of finding out who are your most influential followers, guiding you towards the right people you should be targeting when aiming to share and promote online content.
   
5. Buffer
   Buffer is a smart and easy way to schedule posts across multiple social media networks. You can schedule your content and stagger the times throughout the day. This lets you keep a consistent schedule all week long without worrying about micro-managing the delivery times. It also provides analytics about user engagement and the reach of your posts.

 

 Top five paid 

1. Sysomos 
   A real-time monitoring dashboard that collects relevant online conversations about your brand and provides insights with detailed metrics and graphics.
2. Lithium
   Lithium has an excellent workflow manager that allows your team to have expert reign over sentiment analysis and customer interaction.
3. Collective Intellect 
   This service from Oracle captures millions of conversations a day across multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. It extracts sentiments, preferences, and intentions from those sources and displays the information in real time.
4. Brandwatch 
   Fellow Brightonians - Brandwatch scours the web and summarises what’s being said about brands, people, and products. Define keywords to track (brands, topics, people names, products) and get access to mentions,  trend and campaign analysis, and competitive info.
5. Social Sprout 
   Is a great tool that is particularly good for ease of use, with incredibly powerful search & influence tools, customisable messaging from multiple networks in one location and advanced message scheduling

 

Over to you!

This only a very a small selection of some of the great products out there that can help you with your monitoring and measurement of social media.  

If there are any new ones out there, or any others that you think are great and should be included in our list, please let us know!  

This article was posted in SEO by Tamara Mansfield Kerr