Week 6 Monitoring and Measuring

This week’s assignment asks students to research three free measurement tools and one additional paid analytic tool. There are so many tools out there to help professionals and new users like me in understanding how to monitor your social networks. Tools like these really do help manage the information and all your networks!

Free measurement tools

Stats in Google BloggerIn my search for tools that can help you monitor and measure your social media program, I started to look at my personal blog. I am using Google’s Blogger. Within the tool, a simple Stats page provides you with a high-level summary of the number of page views. The report shows page views for today, yesterday, last month and all time history. You can also look at traffic sources and page views by country, browsers and operating systems.

Page view tracking in Google Blogger

Reppler
I learned about this tool from a colleague and saved it as a favorite to look at later. Reppler is a tool that helps you manage your online image across different social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.


Reppler looks at how your social media networks might perceive you by analyzing the tone you use in your interactions, the words you use, activities and Facebook wall sources and categories. I like that it works with you on a continuous basis by emailing you progress reports to summarize your activities across your social networks that could affect your online image.



Reppler



HootSuite’s Basic Social Media Dashboard

With the basic version of HootSuite’s social media monitoring dashboard you can link a number of your networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace etc. With the basic plan you get some free quick reports, connect up to five social profiles, two RSS/atom feeds and a list of your promoted tweets.

Having never used the tool I signed up for their basic plan and received an email with a lot of great information for someone to get started. HootSuite not only allows you to monitor your social networks but you can manage them with this integrated interface.

HootSuite also offers a paid professional version for just $5.99 a month with additional monitoring and measurement tools at your fingertips. I also checked out their blog and noticed that they offer Social Media Education for Industry Leading Professionals through their HootSuite University Certification Program.

Paid Analytics

SAS Social Media Analytics is an on-demand application offering that integrates archives, analyzes and reports on the effects of online conversations occurring across professional, consumer-generated and social network media sites. What I like about this tool is that you can view your social influences by media source. For example, you can check the number of tweets, mentions, replies, retweets and followers all in one central place.

The tool can also help you with the following:

• Monitoring online conversations
• Alert you of good and bad influences so that you can react in a timely fashion
• Help you understand your audience behaviors

After all this research, I still cannot decide which the best tool is for a new beginner. I am looking forward to reading reviews from my colleagues, hoping to learn more about how to monitor and measure social media and networking activities. I also hope to learn a few tips along the way!