You can’t manage what you don’t measure. It’s an old axiom that is particularly poignant in the digital age.
Businesses suddenly need to keep tabs on fluctuating numbers and the reasons behind the fluctuations. Return on investment is now far more important than ever before in the social media arena. But it’s feasible to invest thousands of dollars to buy an enterprise-class listening tool if you are tight on budget.
Don’t fret, here are some free tools which will help you track social media numbers better. I’ve used each of them personally:
1. Twitonomy: As the name suggests, this is an analytics tool for Twitter. In my opinion this is one of the most robust tools for analyzing Twitter numbers. The best part is… You don’t have to pay a dime for it.
- You can select a period of time and look up the number of re-tweets, replies, user mentions, tweets retweeted and favorited and the number of tweets per day in a single section of the dashboard.
- Moreover it tells you the number of users who you most re tweeted, replied to and mentioned in your tweets.
- It gives you information about your twitter activity on the basis of hours and days of the week so you can see which days you have been most active and what the results have been.
- It specifically points out to your popular tweets and tells you how many retweets and favourites that particular tweet has received.
- My favourite feature is “Visualise on a map” where you will see this awesome twitter bird falling on each location from where you have been mentioned within the selected range of dates.
- Lastly, it shows you your followers and the people you follow along with information on whether they follow you back or not, the date they joined Twitter and other basics.
In the free version you can only view the information and take screen shots. Upgrading to premium at the rate of $19 a month or $199 a year will let you download this extensive information in the form of Excel spreadsheets or PDF. I think the free version of this tool is really good for Twitter analysis.
2. TweetReach:
If you wish to know how many people have seen the hashtag that you are hoping to trend then this is the right tracker for you. This tool also provides analytics for twitter handles and URL’s. So if you are promoting your website post on Twitter then this tool will tell you the number of people who have seen the URL. After you sign in with your twitter id it provides the following metrics:
- It gives you the estimated reach which is the total number of twitter accounts that were reached.
- The number of impressions which will help you understand the exposure your URL or hash tag or twitter handle has received.
- Tweet Reach will also provide you with the number of replies, tweets and retweets the target has received.
- It provides a neat activity graph which will help you understand the activity, number of tweets and contributors by date.
- Besides this, it will supply you information on the names of all the contributors, the top contributors, the tweet timeline where the target was mentioned and the most retweeted tweets.
- You can print the data or even get a permanent link where your report will be stored. However you need to register in order to download the data in the form of PDF or Excel.
Combining this data with Twitonomy will help you get complete information.
3. All my plus:
Though this platform is fairly new, Google+ is the fastest growing social network this year. If you are experimenting with this platform, then this tool will give you stats that matter as soon as you sign in with your Google Plus ID.
- It will give you an overview total number of posts that you have shared publicly and among communities. (Though I have shared in communities, this tool is unable to track that for some reason.)
- It tracks your daily and weekly posting behavior. In addition, it will also let you know about the number of posts you have made per hour.
- This tool also gives you your popular posts and the people who re shared it.
- You can download all this data as CSV for free.
4. Twittercounter:
If you wish to know how many followers you have lost or gained then TwitterCounter can help you. It provides stats on the number of tweets, followers, number of people you are following and your rank worldwide. It also provides a little prediction box which forecasts how many people may add up as followers in the future. The information is free but if you need to download the report then an upgrade will cost you $17 a month for one account.
5. Minilytics :
This analytics tool is for the biggest social network – Facebook. This is a simple tool which provides information the following questions:
- What is the best performing post of last month?
- Who should I target my promoted posts to? And
- Which recent posts should I have promoted?
- I still prefer the Facebook Insights tool since it provides way more detailed data and is free.
The above tools not only provide you with data but also act as indicators to making better marketing decisions in the future. Now that you have these tools at your disposal you can not only track and measure results but also get things done.
Do you know of any useful analytics tool for social media? Share with us in the comments below.