In order to best connect with your prospective audience, you’re going to want to know who your audience is and to ensure that your message reaches them. This is even more important with social media as it tends to have rapid communications. This means that there’s a lot of data that usually needs to be sorted and displayed graphically.
Unfortunately there aren’t a whole lot of tools dedicated for tracking social media interaction like there are for monitoring organic SEO.
But there’s still a few tools available for webmasters to use, some of which take more knowledge than others. Below is a quick list of the top 5 free tools for monitoring your social media, but please bear in mind that not all are intended to be used simultaneously. Experiment and see which work the best for you.
5. Facebook Insights
– This tool allows you to measure page interaction on Facebook. The analysis is rather comprehensive, giving you a number for how many fans you have and just how they’re interacting with you.
Insights ends up being split into two main sections: user and insights. Users lets you track who is following your pages, demographic information such as the age and gender of the users, page growth or shrinkage, and information on traffic sources. An overlooked feature is the fact that you can see where your traffic comes from and thus who would be most interested in your page. Interactions lets you see an analysis of interaction with each update to your page that you’ve made. It’s particularly useful because you can see what works best with your fans.
4. Twitter Analyzer
– Twitter Analyzer is a tool that says it’s the “most advanced Twitter analytics tool in the world” and lives up to it, or at least does a good job of trying. It is a tool that allows you to see a plethora of information simply by logging into your Twitter account and authorizing the API.
This analytics tool allows for you to see your own level of tweets over a set duration of time, graphs of your conversations, popularity via retweets and, most importantly, a graph that shows you your level of reach. When used properly, this can give you massive amounts of trends and information about your Twitter followers.
3. Omgili Graphs
– Omgili isn’t exactly the prettiest of graphing utilities, but it is probably the best in what it does. You can enter two terms that will be searched for and displayed in real time. This is great for tracking when your name, your product or your website is mentioned.
That’s not all Omgili Graphs can do. It can show you predictions between search terms and if you’re interested in seeing what dates have a correlation for higher chatter about your website, product or brand. It can also be used to compare which are talked about more often and when.
2. Backtype
– This is a particularly innovative sort of tool that deals with measuring your impact over various mediums. You can directly see how people are interacting with your social media by using it. You simply put in your URL and information on your website such as tweets, comments on your website, and comments on Digg are displayed.
Arguably the most useful feature is the fact that you can compare your website to others in cold, hard numerical statistics. This allows you to see how well you engage your audience versus how other websites do. It also allows you to do research on websites that engage better and modify your own tactics.
1. InMotion’s QuickTagger
(http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/tools/quicktagger) – Twitter referrals are a blatantly difficult thing for webmasters to track. In Google Analytics, they come up as “direct traffic” because URL shorteners like bit.ly, which Twitter uses, use a 301 redirect. This tool is the best thing you can do as of current in order to track media interaction between Twitter users and your website.
You define a label for Google to track your link by and then it shows up as a statistic in Google Analytics. It’s as simple as that. It also circumvents the redirects put in place by social networks like Facebook and allows you to see which links compose of what activity on your website. Because QuickTagger works as a bookmarklet, it’s a tool that is essential and lightweight.
Web Hosting Specialist
Juliana is an Online Specialist for a VPS Hosting provider based in Los Angeles @InMotionHosting. You can follow her on Twitter @JulianaPayson.
