One of the biggest challenges I have faced whilst working in social media is how to maximise my outreach and measure success. Social media measurement is still a relatively new area but as long as you are clear on what your goals are then there are a number of social media tools that can be utilised effectively to help you make the most of your campaigns.
Along the way I have come across a number of free tools that I have found hugely helpful. I have listed some of my favourites below and hope they help you too! Any additions are always welcome so if there are any others that you know of, then please feel free to comment below and I’ll add them to the list.
Top Tools
Simply Measured.
http://simplymeasured.com/free-social-media-tools
Amazing tool for just about everything! Allows you to report on Twitter, Facebook and exports to spreadsheets for analysis or rebranding.
Snap bird –
http://snapbird.org/
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Gnip –
http://gnip.com/
– Historical Twitter data. Brilliant for reporting as it search Twitter timeline.
Social Bro –
http://www.socialbro.com/
Trendsmap -
http://www.trendsmap.com/
Trendsmap is a tool that displays real time local twitter trends in a very visual way. The main area of the site is a map of the globe, which is littered with words. These words are topics, keyphrases or hashtags that are popular on Twitter in real-time.
Hashtracking –
http://www.hashtracking.com/
Hashtracking is a really useful site that creates extensive reports on a singular hashtag. This is ideal if you have used one in a campaign or event and need to report on the effectiveness of it.One thing to note is that it uses on a sample of 1,500 tweets when it generates the report, so this will not give you all twitter activity that has used a hashtag if it is very popular.
TweetReach –
http://www.tweetreach.com/
TweetReach is a really simple tool that measures the effectiveness of a particular tweet. This makes it useful for reporting on tweets that form part of a campaign or even to test your tweets to see how different factors can affect their success.
Follower Wonk:
http://followerwonk.com/
Followerwonk is a really useful tool for analysing and growing your Twitter community.
- Search Twitter bios
- Compare users – see how your competitiors stack up
- Analyse followers – see who the followers/friends are of any account
- Track followers – view changes in your social graph
- Sort followers – sort your followers by name, account age etc. Requires paid credits.
Tweets stats-
http://tweetstats.com/graphs
Tweetstats offers a snapshot of stats for Twitter accounts in a graphical and easy-to-read format. Simply enter a twitter name (yours or someone else’s) and click the button. It takes a few minutes to run, but then you are taken to a dashboard with charts and graphs split into two separate areas: Tweet Stats and Tweet Cloud.
Loca follow -
http://www.locafollow.com/
Allows you to search for people based on bio and geographical location
Listorious
http://www.listorious.com/
Listorious is a useful quick search tool that allows you to find ‘experts’ on Twitter.
By searching for ‘tags’ or keyphrases you are then presented with results of twitter users, with their bio, profile pic and number of followers. If you’re signed in to Twitter then you can follow people directly.
Twittercounter
http://www.twittercounter.com/
Twittercounter is another useful reporting and analysis tool to give you some basic, headline stats.By entering your account name (or another one) then signing in to Twitter will give you a host of stats about your followers, who you are following and your tweets.
A graph shows the growth of your followers or those you are following over a specific time period (which can be altered), plus another graph shows the number of tweets you have made
Another stat shows you a prediction of how many followers you will have in ‘x’ number of days. You can use the sliding scale to alter this.
Topsy
http://www.topsy.com/
Topsy is a great tool for social media monitoring in general, but it deserves a mention as a Twitter tool. It’s billed as a “real time search for the social web” and that’s exactly what it does. Simply enter a search term – a brand, keyphrase, event, hashtag etc – and you will be presented with search results pulled in from a number of sources.
These can be filtered by type of result – tweets, links, images, videos, experts – and also by network – currently Twitter or Google+.
Twylah
http://www.twylah.co.uk
Twylah builds a topic-cantered landing page (called a “Twylah”) that contains links to topics that are deemed to be the ones that you tweet most about.
Paper.li
http://www.paper.li/
Paper.li is a quick and automated way to create an online newspaper. It is described as a “content curation service” and uses sources including your Twitter account, plus G+, RSS feeds and Facebook to create a really visual ‘paper’. This can be browsed by people using Paper.li but also will get found via search.
WhoTweetedMe
http://www.whotweetedme.com/
WhoTweetedMe is a tool from Hubspot and is described as “contagious content analytics”.
It’s quick and easy analysis of a url to see who tweeted you. Simply enter the url of something you tweeted and then you’ll get to see:
- Number of retweets
- Average followers (of the people who retweeted you)
- Potential Reach
There’s also a RT timeline, to show you when these occurred, plus a list of the top 20 most influential ReTweeters. And you can ‘thank’ these retweeters with a built in tweet.
Useful Engagement tools
Useful tool for finding people in the same area.
Twitter poll. Great different way to get customer feedback. Share poll with twitter followers and Facebook friends. Can later post this onto a blog to gain further followers and fans.
Gives good stats with regards to tweet times, see followers and recent interactions. Find out what times retweeted the most.
gives diagram + compares 3 profiles followers) Great way to compare twitter profile followers and friends. Finds who follows who, who your most influential followers are and compares.
http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/#
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Great visual of followers/ connected conversations via hasthtags
Shows tweetcloud of @mentions + world map of engagement
http://twileshare.com/app/share
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Upload docs to twitter, pdfs, ebooks, images and gives back stats.
Manage followers
http://friendorfollow.com/
– Manage followers
http://twitterfeed.com/-
Feed your blog/ news into Twitter
Twitter Follower Directories
