If your organization doesn’t have a huge budget for measurement, or if you need a quick measurement fix, here are a few free online tools for getting results. The tool suggestions come from Jeff Bullas’ post about the 13 essential social media monitoring tools on his blog, Rob Gonda’s post about free social media monitoring tools on Take Me To Your Leader, and Tom Walker’s post about 10 social media monitoring tools on WebDesignBooth, but I compiled a list of the tools on each website that I thought worked well for measuring the metrics I’ve discussed in my previous posts.
For Blogs:
- Technorati. From Jeff Bullas’ post. The most widely known and comprehensive measurement tool for measuring blogs is Technorati. Technorati has a database of all the top blogs and categorizes search results for your organization and its constituents. Use it to find out where your company ranks in the blogosphere, and to find out what topics are worth blogging about.
For Keyword Search:
- GoogleAlerts: From Jeff Bullas’ post. This alert system notifies users when online information in Google searches matches the keywords used in their social media. Use it to help your organization target key words to enhance SEO, and help search ranking and overall influence.
For Page Ranking:
- PageRankCheck: From Rob Gonda’s post. Simply type in your organization’s URL and this tool will show you your Google page rank. Use this to measure how visible your strategies are, and how big of an audience you’re reaching.
For Social Networking Sites:
- TweetDeck: From Tom Walker’s post. Integrates Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz and FourSquare. Not only can you monitor how you’re doing, how often you’re being searched and how your keywords are used in these networks, you can also simultaneously update your activity on the sites. It’s available on your desktop, IPad, IPhone or Android phone so your organization can stay updated on the go.
Extras:
- Bit.ly: From Rob Gonda’s post. This site lets you shorten long URL links, share your links, and manage the clicks on your links. It can show you the number of clicks, who clicked, where they clicked from, and how often they clicked.
- Addict-o-Matic: From Tom Walker’s post. This site brings together information about your organization and its keywords all over the Internet. It takes information from your video sharing websites, blogs, social networks, picture-sharing sites, and can even get information from your traditional media. Users can create their own page with information relevant to the keywords and content within their organization’s social media.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of this new social media information, don’t worry. You’re not alone, and organizations, as well as constituents, are still learning together. Here’s a video that I felt would be a welcome break from all of these text-heavy posts. Adam Ostrow of Mashable.com shows in this video how easy it can be to keep yourself and your organization connected. He also mentions measurement tools that I didn’t list, so take some time to look at these after the video for more help in measuring your social media.
