Social Media Measurement Tools
3 Steps to Picking the Right Social Media Measurement Tools
- Understand business outcome
- Identify the social media activity
- Analyse the relationship between social media activity and business outcome
Then pick a tool.
I cannot stress enough how important it is though, to understand that relationship between social media activity and business outcome. That’s where the expertise is, that’s where the ROI is.
Which tools do I use to measure social media?
This would have to be the most asked question of the lot – but honestly, it’s like asking how long is a piece of string. Last night I presented at Social Media Club Sydney (slides and notes now available) and still there was a call to look at which tools.
Which one are essential to me? Google Analytics and Bit.ly for starters. For sentiment? Use a fucking person.
Katie Chatfield has done a presentation to look at some of the tools available – and you’ll instantly see how overwhelming it can be. But that’s ok – because you need to know what you are valuing first, and look at the tools last.
measurementcamp also published another list of social media tools you can use:
- Addictomatic A cool search engine that aggregates rss feeds into a nice visual dashboard
- Blogpulse Blog search engine with conversation tracker tool
- Boardreader Search forums and message boards
- Boardtracker Forum search engine offering instant alerts
- Buzzmonitor Embeddable widget showing recent instances of your search term
- Compete.com Comparable site metrics for any website
- Del.ici.ous Social bookmarking engine. Search by tags and subscribe to feed results
- Facebook lexicon Searches facebook walls for words and phrases
- Google alerts Email updates of key search terms
- Google insights Compare search volume over time
- Google trends Compare search term trends
- Howsociable Gives a social media score for your brand, with email updates of your score.
- Ice rocket Blog search engine with results rss feed
- Newsflashr News search engine, presenting results in nice dashboard
- Sphere Related content widget
- Summize Search for keywords in ‘tweets’.
- Technorati Blog and social media search engine
- Twing Discussion board and forum search engine
- Twingly Spam free blog search engine
- Twitturly Track what urls people are talking about on twitter
- Xinu Shows how well your site is performing across different metrics. Also gives a site diagnosis.
- Quarkbase Fricking cool mashup tool
- Twitter Grader Enter your twitter username to get your grade and ranking
- Twist Graph Keyword trends in Twitter. Very cool.
- yExplore Not strictly social media, but easy access to see inbound links to a page.
- Trendpedia Excellent blog search engine that graphs results over time.
- Website Grader Not completely sure how accurate, but cool tool anyway!
- Yahoo Pipes Err, yeah, can’t believe I missed this off in the first place.
- Socialmention Real time UGC search engine, with social rank
- Bit.ly and Cli.gs – analytics for your tiny urls.
19 Comments
Awesome list – thanks!
Jye,
A comprehensive and helpful list of SM metrix.
I like how you are totally ‘commercial’ in terms of keeping focused on the bottomline for your clients too – some people forget about that.
Thanks Mal!
Sarah – really appreciate it. I’ve always been able to talk about ‘fluff’ but I really wanted step change all that with some talk about bottom line stuff.
Hey Jye,
Nice list!
I’d love to see which ones of them actually help manage social interactions too.
I know Radian6 does it well!
JB
PEOPLE measure interactions best. Don’t rely on tools. But Radian6 is the best for information management I’ve seen so far – you just need to have a client big enough worthy of the cost and training.
Thanks for creating this list. Very helpful. Here’s a couple more useful tools for social media monitoring:
ViralHeat: http://www.viralheat.com/home?title=Home
SocialSeek: http://www.sensidea.com/socialseek/
Nice list
I wonder for sentiment measurement, how effective is it if analyst from different cultures are doing it? Such as offshoring?
@james and @jye thanks to both of you for the Radian6 shout outs. Much appreciated.
Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6
Gday Jye – I want to make a suggestion around the use of the language “business outcome.” For me this term is too loose. The word outcome doesn’t imply a positive or even success of an activity. Here is an example why …
We have a client who was telling one of our consultants that she is concerned that no one is using the new website that her team built (business outcome = new website). For the record, we don’t develop sites so we weren’t involved in its development.
Our consultant asked” So what is the benefit of the new website?” to which she replied “We’ll, it’s new and better. It is much better than the old one”.
The key point here is that the business outcome was the website but what is the benefit it provides?
I know it is splitting hairs but realising benefits from activities and projects has an important alignment with the strategic direction of the business. It is also about using common language so all involved can understand.
This is really important stuff if any of your readers happen to have Government Departments as clients as Federal Government, and more and more state Governments, are using this language through their use of recognised project and programme management techniques. And the use of these techniques are an important aspect of Departments accessing money for new projects as evidence of these are required as an indicator that they will be successful in delivering benefits (not just an “outcome”).
Hey Daniel,
The term is only loose if the business owner or decision maker fails to understand what a business outcome is.
If your client doesn’t understand the difference between features and benefits then I believe its more of a communication or business expression concern.
An outcome vs a business outcome are different, and I think it’s important that one understands the divide.
The business outcomes I generally refer to are profit. Make money. The new website should be contributing to that: it should be an investment tied to a particular business outcome.
Building a website or completing a website is one of the activities (ideally through analytics) that should be tied to delivering a business outcome – and it’s the relationship between the activity and the business outcome that should be well known.
I really am appreciative of you pointing this out — i think its so important businesses interested in social media understand this, so massive thank you mate!
Fantastic list, thanks a lot for this.
I find myself reusing a lot of the same tools (because they do exactly what I want I guess), but something like this can hopefully introduce me to a few new ones that change everything. I’m off to have some fun.
No probs Jye, I think my point was more around a “common language” and clearly not everyone is one the same page.
It is also linked in with businesses using project management techniques which use very clearly defined terms so that there is zero confusion between goals, outcomes, benefits etc
It isn’t that a client doesn’t understand the difference between features and benefits but that ‘everyone’ understands them to be the SAME thing.
It is very symptomatic of business re-inventing wheels!
Cheers mate
Great slideshow Jye (and Katie), definitely agreed on sentiment.. machine based analysis seems too flawed right now, get a human or two involved instead!
Another tool you may want to consider in the social media measurement field is Moreover’s UGC offering (http://w.moreover.com/public/products/ugc_metabase.html) which has recently been grown to include Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, wikis and forums.
Hey Jye,
I liked your post a lot. I think there are many ways of leveraging social media, not just listening and trying to contain negative feedback.
I’d love to chat sometime. Shoot me an email: Aaron[at]infegy.com
Great starting point.
I would also add http://www.tealium.com/ to the list.
Jye good post and agree with your approach. Re benefits, features etc discussion we use the following progression, which is essential if you are to understand how to develop a value proposition.
1. features
2. advantages
3. benefits
4. value
Value = benefits – cost
Features are designed by marketing and that’s in fact about the closest marketing can get to understanding value – a long way from it. Features relate to market segments not customers.
Advantages are the subset of features, translated by sales people from the feature set into a advantages for a particular customers or a very tight small homogeneous segment. The launch of a new website at best conveys advantages – in itself. As you said, the benefits are what the business actually derives from the new website, and this is higher up the value chain.
Benefits are what matters to a particular customer as in the one being sold to by a salesperson, or the one being sold to by a company through their website. They are only definable in relation to a specific person or circumstance. Sales people try to translate Advantages into Benefits for a particular buyer.
Value represents the excess of benefits over cost. This also is specific to an individual buyer or circumstance. Sales people seek to convince a specific circumstance or buyer of value by adjusting value perceptions and cost inputs.
Marketing is totally remote from this activity, except that in web-centric online selling e.g. Software as a Service, the website has to progress from delivering a marketing message to leading buyers into a benefits and value assessment, usually by demonstrating value in a trial (e.g. freemium and then upsell).
(This latter point is a remarkable difference in selling software as a service as opposed to selling web access to software.)
A social media strategy obviously has to address the value issue, and the ROI and business case would speak to this. As you said, most people confuse features and benefits.
- Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy, Australia
http://socialmedia-academy.com.au
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Thank Jye. My favourite tracker which is not on this list is http://www.daymix.com. It is by far the most comprehensve one I have used. I find many of the above (to be fair I have only trialed 4 -5 of them) concentrate on just blogs. Daymix however provides a dashboard of results that covers blogs, google search, Twitter, delicious, youtube and when appropriate Facebook and MySpace.
Other links you may find useful for your next list are also http://www.backtype.com and http://www.flirtbox.com.
Just started reading your blog after Julian’s under 27 list. Will be back!
Thanks
I’ve found another site valuation tool and it seems to provide competitive analysis for free. I’m talking about http://www.estimix.com .