Thursday, November 20, 2008

Ambiguity Answered: Top 5 Social Media Measurement Tools

Percolating oneself on every social network seems to be the common strategy for practitioners wanting to stay ahead of new media competitors. Though, if you spend your time fragmenting, you’re going to miss out on the thing that matters most to landing online business: social media measurement tools.

An ambiguous area to say the least, social media measurement is something not even the experts have been able to completely understand, but companies are trying. Here are the top 5 social media measurement tools to add to your proposal:

  • Trackur Similar to Google Alerts in terms of pop-up value, the site also allows you the ability to filter out keywords that don’t belong in your search. You can add as many filters as you like. Comparable to Google Reader with its results userface, Trackur features share and RSS feed subscription. Trackur’s biggest advantage: highly specific, though search results can take 2-3 minutes.
  • Compete.com A must-have for monitoring the popularity of one Web site over another, Compete generates web traffic and indicates visitor frequency daily and annually. For example, searching perezhilton vs. techcrunch reveals, while Websites are entirely dissimilar, they maintain similar web traffic.
  • Vitrue SMI Vitrue asks the question, “How social is your advertising?” A quick comparison search will reveal not only the popularity of the subject or phrase, but where it’s most likely discussed, such as forums, microblogs, blogs, and video-sharing. This tool was highly impressive when it came to projection monitoring of the 2008 Presidential Election.
  • Forrester Research- Social Technographics Tool This free and fast tool will provide you insight into where your client should focus their audience. After filtering gender, age, and country—the result is an analysis on whether or not you should advise set up on blogs, discussion boards, or microsites.
  • Search.twitter.com Don’t underestimate the power of search on a microblog. Extremely fast turnaround, search.twitter.com allows you to directly reach out to your consumers after they tweet about bad or exemplary services and products.