3 Steps to Picking the Right Social Media Measurement Tools
- Understand business outcome
- Identify the social media activity
- Analyse the relationship between social media activity and business outcome
Then pick a tool.
I cannot stress enough how important it is though, to understand that relationship between social media activity and business outcome. That’s where the expertise is, that’s where the ROI is.
Which tools do I use to measure social media?
This would have to be the most asked question of the lot – but honestly, it’s like asking how long is a piece of string. Last night I presented at Social Media Club Sydney (slides and notes now available) and still there was a call to look at which tools. Which one are essential to me? Google Analytics and Bit.ly for starters. Katie Chatfield has done a presentation to look at some of the tools available – and you’ll instantly see how overwhelming it can be. But that’s ok – because you need to know what you are valuing first, and look at the tools last.
MeasurementCamp also published another list of social media tools you can use:
- Addictomatic A cool search engine that aggregates rss feeds into a nice visual dashboard
- Blogpulse Blog search engine with conversation tracker tool
- Boardreader Search forums and message boards
- Boardtracker Forum search engine offering instant alerts
- Buzzmonitor Embeddable widget showing recent instances of your search term
- Compete.com Comparable site metrics for any website
- Del.ici.ous Social bookmarking engine. Search by tags and subscribe to feed results
- Facebook lexicon Searches facebook walls for words and phrases
- Google alerts Email updates of key search terms
- Google insights Compare search volume over time
- Google trends Compare search term trends
- Howsociable Gives a social media score for your brand, with email updates of your score.
- Ice rocket Blog search engine with results rss feed
- Newsflashr News search engine, presenting results in nice dashboard
- Sphere Related content widget
- Summize Search for keywords in ‘tweets’.
- Technorati Blog and social media search engine
- Twing Discussion board and forum search engine
- Twingly Spam free blog search engine
- Twitturly Track what urls people are talking about on twitter
- Xinu Shows how well your site is performing across different metrics. Also gives a site diagnosis.
- Quarkbase Fricking cool mashup tool
- Twitter Grader Enter your twitter username to get your grade and ranking
- Twist Graph Keyword trends in Twitter. Very cool.
- yExplore Not strictly social media, but easy access to see inbound links to a page.
- Trendpedia Excellent blog search engine that graphs results over time.
- Website Grader Not completely sure how accurate, but cool tool anyway!
- Yahoo Pipes Err, yeah, can’t believe I missed this off in the first place.
- Socialmention Real time UGC search engine, with social rank
- Bit.ly and Cli.gs – analytics for your tiny urls.
Marketing with New Technology 
