7 Free Tools To Monitor Your Social Media Marketing
The importance of monitoring what people are saying about you online, shouldn’t be underestimated.
There are lots of free tools out there for monitoring, measuring and analyzing your social media presence and marketing. I have compiled a list of 7 free tools. This list is far from exhaustive, but is a snapshot of what I think are some useful tools to help you get started on monitoring and measuring your social media campaigns.
Social Media Dashboards
Hootsuite DashBoard
A simple way to keep track of your brand or other topics of interest is through applications such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or HootSuite. This can be achieved by simply creating a new column that displays any tweets mentioning your brand or topic of interest. The nice thing about this method is that you can reply and respond to people mentioning your brand.
I started off using TweetDeck but have recently given Hootsuite a try. It seems to do that little bit more than TweetDeck. HootSuite enables you to update to multiple accounts at once, and supports Twitter, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn, Wordpress, MySpace and Four Square. Similar to TweetDeck, these features make the application useful for maintaining your overall social presence. However, the major differences that stand out for me are that you can allow other users to jointly update an account, review success in realtime with integrated click through statistics, integrate google analytics and it requires no downloads. 
Twitter Search
There are some fantastic advanced search commands you can use with Twitter’s search engine. From simple brand related searches to location and attitudes, Twitter Search can do it all. Whats more Twitter Search enables you to set an RSS feed up on the search term of your choice in your outlook, this will make it easier to keep track of chatter revolving around your brand.
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights provides you with metrics around your brand page. These insights allow you to see and analyze trends within fan growth and demographics, interacrtion with your customers and creation of content.
Google Analytics
You may not think of Google Analytics when you think of social media, but you should. With Google Analytics, you can track social networks as a stand alone traffic medium. You can use this to compare your social networks traffic against other traffic sources by average basket size, conversion rate and much more. This great tip from Econsultancy shows you how to set this up in your anayltics.
Source: Econsultancy
bit.ly
bit.ly
There are many services avaialble now that will shortern, share and track your links. I use bit.ly, this has a nice feature that allows you to see how many clicks your links are getting in realtime and look at refferer and location information. It is also possible to to chose bit.ly as the service you use to shorten URLs in Tweetdeck, this allows you to track your tweets from TweekDeck in your bit.ly account.
To do this simplly create a bit.ly account. Then log on to your TweetDeck, go to settings, then click on services and chose bit.ly in the secon box down, enter your bit.ly username and API Key. Then save settings.
Delicious Search
This useful tool allows you to see how many times pages from your site have been bookmarked by others.
Digg Search
Digg Search Much like Delicious, you can see how many times pages have been Dugg by others.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a brilliant social media search engine that pulls together user generated content from across a range of social media into a single stream of information. What I particulary like about this tool is that as well as displaying the latest results it gives a sentiment score of positive, negative, and, neutral and shows related keywords, reach and many other useful metrics. You can also set up to recieve alerts like Google Alerts but for social media.
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