Social Media Analytic Tools
One of the most important and, unfortunately, often overlooked aspects of social media is measurement. Knowing how successful your efforts have been is important if you want to continue to build awareness among your target segments. Analyzing the return on investment doesn’t require a degree in statistics. With so many free social media analytic tools available on the web any Joe or Jane can login to get a snapshot of their marketing performance. Here are a few tools that to help with monitoring:
Google Alerts
This is an excellent (and easy) way to track specific keywords that relate to you and your brand. For instance, as an author, you could designate the name of your book and your own name as search terms for Google. Each day, you’ll receive an email notification with a summary of mentions. Google Alerts makes it very easy to identify who’s talking and sharing information about you. It’s free and effective.
Bit.ly
As most tweeters know, Twitter has a 140 character limitation which includes URLs. The Bit.ly shortener allows users to condense long links into compact versions. Optimizing URLs through Bit.ly also gives users an opportunity to track how many times people are clicking on your shared links. This provides you with a number of impressions so you can gauge what content links are performing better than others and make adjustments as needed.
Xinureturns
This is a very hand all-in-one tool that gives you an overview of PageRank, backlinks, quantity of indexed pages and much more. Simply type in any URL that you wish to see stats on and they instantly appear. Xinureturns is a quick way to look at how your multi-metric performance. The only drawback with Xinureturns is that there is a slight discrepancy with the data that it pulls. Check carefully to insure that what you’re seeing is current.
There are many free tools available. Hunt around and you’re certain to find some freebies that will make analyzing and measuring much easier.
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