If you deal with social media in a bid to increase your SEO rankings, you know that connecting to a bigger network and engaging with your audience is only part of the process. To get results and visibility, you need to be able to collect, monitor and track the data gathered.
While each social media channel generally has an inbuilt tracking and analysis tool, when you deal with more than one channel, it makes sense to invest in monitoring software.
The following belong to a growing list of Social Media Monitoring Software that helps you explore numbers and data, schedule posts, and share information. Writing content, sharing it on social media sites, and tracking it to obtain results is a fail-proof three step process.
Hootsuite: My all time favorite, Hootsuite is an easy to use tool that lets you manage all your social media accounts on a single interface. I use it for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but you can use it for MySpace, WordPress and foursquare as well. You can customize your analytics with over 30 individual report options to select from; track brand sentiment and followers’ growth; and schedule messages in advance. And yes, it comes with mobile app options for the Android, Blackberry, Keitai, iPad, and iPhone.
Crowdbooster: I use this as well. Like Hootsuite, it offers a free and paid for option, both which come with a dashboard that shows you how well you’re doing on your Twitter and Facebook page. It also provides you with recommendations as to when you should be posting tweets.
Addict-o-matic: You can browse the site for news, blog posts, videos, and images, and find out what’s happening across multiple sources. Personalize your search, bookmark the page and you’re done.
Broadtracker: A slightly more advanced tool than Addictomatic (in my opinion), Boardtracker using discussion boards and forums in addition to websites to track news and content. You can discover influencers, track competitors, find customers, monitor your brand, engage in advanced analytics, and subscribe to RSS feeds.
Social Mention: Social Mention is similar to Google Alerts in that you can search for topics and receive daily email alerts on brands, company, campaigns, stories, competitors, and people. It’s billed as a social media search and analysis platform, which monitors over 100 social media sites.
Sysomos: Sysomos offers social media monitoring and analytics for business, marketers, and advertisers. It gathers data from blogs and social networks, message boards, forums, and wikis. It was also the first to announce an integration of Google+ into its platform. Its products include Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat, a real-time social media monitoring tool.
HowSociable: On the face of it all, HowSociable seems a fairly simple tool. But it does offer in-depth competitor analysis, daily updates of the brands you track, visibility history of brands, and detailed analysis which can be exported to your spreadsheets.
CoTweet: Similar to Hootsuite in that it is accessed through a web browser, CoTweet is a good social media management and analytical tool for Twitter users. It works well for any organization, as it allows different team members to engage in Twitter. Its OnDuty feature helps you keep track of who’s on Twitter-duty. You can schedule posts, monitor activity, and track campaigns. Its Enterprise option is compatible with CRM tools like Salesforce and mobile apps.
Topsy: Topsy lets you search for tweets, photos, videos, influencers and experts, and trending topics. It monitors in real time and analyzes your Twitter data, so you can create campaigns with a variety of businesses messages that can be tracked and refined. When you combine it with Topsy’s business focused service, Topsy Labs, you can get even more features like social media monitors, back tracking and search by domain, and Twitter handle or keyword functionalities.
Klout: Klout bills itself as the standard for influence. It allows you to measure True Reach (the number of people you influence), Amplification (how much you influence them), and Network Impact (the influence of your audience). Recently, there’s been much discussed about the effectiveness of Klout, but if you take it with its flaws, lack of transparency being the most touted, you can use it as a means to evaluate your own social activity.
