5 must have tools for social media monitoring

Being creative and transparent is only half the story when it comes to social media marketing. In order to develop and execute a truly successful social media campaign, you simply must be able to monitor your results. At the end of the day, your boss (if you work as marketing director at a company for example) will probably be more impressed by cold hard numbers than how cool your Twitter or Facebook profile looks.

Here are five must have tools for any social media marketing arsenal -

The best tools for your social media monitoring toolbox

1. Social Listening - Here at Off Madison Ave, we're huge fans of two products that facilitate social media listening. They are Spiral16 and Radian6. While both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, you really can't go wrong with either of them.

Spiral16 visualization
Caption: Spiral16 Spark Visualization of Connected Conversations

Spiral16 is a tremendous tool for visualizing conversations that are occuring out on the web and on social networks in particular. Whether it is a blog, message board post, picture or even a video, Spiral will help uncover those conversations and rank them by influence and sentiment.

Radian6 is another great tool we use for social listening. If you need to get a listening campaign up quickly Radian6 is a great choice. You can run a time limited campaign for free to get a lay of the land.

2. URL shorteners - With the meteoric rise in Twitter's popularity, URL shortening services have started to come into their own. A particular favorite is tr.im. Not only will you get the shortest URLS's possible for use on Twitter, you'll also get a fairly robust analytical system to track the number of clicks on your links.

trim click analytics

Mac users: there is a very cool dashboard widget which keeps track of your short urls automatically. Of course, there are also other services available as well - budurl.com and bit.ly specifically.

3. Twitter search - Twitter search is still one of the most effective ways to take a pulse of the social media community. This real time conversational search engine (found here at search.twitter.com) gives you the ability to scan Twitter for conversations happening around specific keywords. Whats more, you can limit your searches by certain geographic areas, users or even basic sentiment.

4. Facebook Insights - Facebook has placed a lot of emphasis on analytics in their Facebook Business Page program, allowing page owners to access information on the age, sex and demographical breakdown of their fans. Couple this with their post quality scoring system and you will know if the content you place on your page is working.

facebook insights

5. Google Analytics - Yep, its good for more than just monitoring your search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click campaign results. Google Analytics is easy to set up, but best of all, free. Get in the habit of monitoring your referring sites to see which social networks provide the most traffic. If you run an e-commerce site, you should be able to marry those referrals to actual sales.

What are the tools you stock your social media toolbox with? We'd love to hear them! Sound off in the comments section below!

About the Author: William Smith

William brings 10 years of interactive marketing experience to Off Madison Ave and serves as the agency’s Search Marketing Manager. In addition to his responsibilities managing pay-per-click and search optimization for clients, William is the agency’s resident twitterholic, and works with the social media department to develop innovative ways of using the medium for marketing.

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7 comments so far

Mark Evans says:

Willliam,

If you get a chance, look at Heartbeat from Sysomos, a cost-effective social measurement and monitoring tool with lots of flexibility and the ability to do unlimited searches with no set-up process. Here's the URL: http://sysomos.com/products/overview/heartbeat.

cheers, Mark

whitney says:

William,
Thank you so much for including Spiral16 in this post! We're very excited about our partnership with Off Madison Ave.

I love tr.im, too. I use it as my only link shortener!

Whitney
Social Media Manager
@spiral16
@whitneymathews

Catherine van Zuylen says:

If you've started with Radian6 or another social monitoring tool and are interested in deeper analysis (also incorporating internal data sources like email and CRM), you should check out what we're doing at Attensity (www.attensity.com).

Brian Johnson says:

For searching through Twitter on a regular and organized basis, Tweetdeck really provides leverage. Between that, Google Alerts, and a handful of other free tools, monitoring really is a low-cost or free process. But it also has limited value for delivering improvements to the bottom line. As Catherine points out, to really harness the value of the social media dataset and use it to inform strategic marketing efforts and other high return initiatives, analytics tools like ours (Networked Insights) and theirs can take you to the next level.

John says:

Looks like tr.im gave up.

Mandy Vavrinak says:

I decided not to link to this post from my blog because the post is undated and I therefore can't tell how recent the info is. Recommend adding a date stamp to the posts.

Melanie D. says:

Nice List ..I do have 1 that is a help and Free that allows you to control your Social Networks Among other Portals.Its proven to be a Great tool Http://www.downloadtrillian.com