Marketers may be less concerned about hard metrics as they invest in social media campaigns this year - but that doesn’t mean they aren't interested at all, or even struggling, in trying to capture value or ROI from their spend. Following are some tools that can help:
Google Analytics. This free tool provides a powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send.
Omniture. Moving up the cost curve, Omniture offers a number of services for social media tracking, components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.
PostRank Analytics. This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats, which can be really important for sentiment analysis, writes Mashable.
HootSuite. Mashable also recommends HootSuite as a great Twitter manager that also offers impressive analytics. "The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites."
Addictomatic. A search engine that compiles a visual representation of presence across such social media sites, Addictomatic can help identify which elements of a corporate presence need to be built up, such as photo or video results.
Tweetlevel. PR-firm Edelman developed this tool that measures an individual's importance or "gravitas" on Twitter using metrics that go beyond a mere tally of followers. It takes into account how many people are following a Twitter user only as a base measurement. It places more importance on what the tweeter says, whether he or she actively participates within the community, and whether people believe what he or she is saying.
Twitalyzer. An analytics application built by Web Analytics Demystified that layers on top of Twitter. It has a variety of functions, but most people use it to track their use of Twitter over time - benchmarking themselves against other Twitter users, and also to determine which social media strategies are working. One of its metrics, the signal-to-noise ratio, measures the tendency for people to pass information, as opposed to anecdote.
Twinfluence Rank. This is an automated third party party tool developed by Guy Hagen, president and founder of Innovation Insight. It uses APIs to measure influence and takes into account such factors as the quality of a group of followers.
The Mirror. Omnicom's Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., partnered with business and analytics firm evolve24 to create a system that integrates both traditional and social media - including conversations that take place on blogs, Twitter, and other online forums.
The Mirror continuously captures the data - which also includes online news, journal articles, wire coverage and broadcasts – and then analyzes it and provides real-time metrics based on topic, stakeholder, sentiment, share of voice, influence and reputation impact, among other things.
