October 11th, 2012
by Steven Shattuck
It’s been said that what gets measured gets done, and improved upon. For the Social Media Manager engaging with communities across multiple channels, analytics are critical to proving ROI and honing future campaigns.
Many social network have built in analytics tools, but if you’re looking to include more complex data-points, it may be appropriate to utilize third-party services. Here are my three of my favorite (free!) social media analytics tools:
Crowdbooster
Between the lack of a native analytics tool within Twitter, and the â in my opinion â wild inadequacy of Facebook Insights (their native analytics), a tool like Crowdbooster is an absolutely essential addition to the Community Manager toolkit.
The basic free account allows you to add one Twitter account and one Facebook page. Crowdbooster allows you to analyze impressions, fan/follower growth and your top fans/followers.
The impressions tool lets you identify your most effective posts/tweets:
This is useful in identifying what types of posts and what time of day your posts generate the most engagement.
Follower Growth graphs gains and losses to your follower count. You can even customize the date range:
Social Media/Community Managers can use the data that Crowdbooster offers as a basis for their demand generation reports, or a simple at-a-glance “how are we doing” vanity metrics briefing.
Followerwonk
While Crowdbooster can give you nice, high-level data on your Twitter accounts, Followerwonk dives deep into who your followers are. With the ability to track, analyze and sort your followers, Followerwonk can give you a great understanding of who your community is and more in-depth data of how it has grown over time.
Followerwonk was recently acquired by SEOmoz – pro users can access it for free.
Pinerly
If Pinterest is an active network for your community, you’ll want to get your hands on an invite to Pinerly as soon as possible.
That’s right â Pinterest analytics!
Not only does Pinerly give you a high-level overview of activity across your boards, you can also create and analyze your campaigns within Pinterest.
For example, if you create a piece of rich media, like an infographic that you know you want to share on Pinterest, you can pin it to your account through Pinerly and then track how itâs clicked, liked and repinned.
You can either track a URL or upload a file directly to pin. In the example below, I’ve chosen a URL:
From the URL, you can choose what image you would like to pin. Add a quick description of the campaign (for us, this was an infographic) and click “Pinerly It.”
Once the campaign has been created and pinned to your account, you can begin to collect data on its performance.
What are some of your favorite social media analytics tools? Let us know in the comments section below.
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