Everything about Web and Network Monitoring
Everything about Web and Network Monitoring
In the “old day,” meaning about 5 years ago, social media strategies were limited and often relied either on hiring a social media expert or purchasing a large-scale and expensive enterprise analytics solution, both of which were out of the reach of most small businesses. Today, however, things have drastically changed! Affordable and highly robust solutions for an effective social media intelligence campaign are easily within the reach of organizations with limited budgets. There are also quite a number of free platforms available. As never before, the small business owner can now sift, analyze, and interpret social media data to obtain the most effective solutions for growing their brands, products, and services in the 21st century.
In the first part of this series we introduced the concept of social media analytics and looked at several leading platforms on the market. We’re continuing where we left off with an overview of some more solutions that are sure to add value to your organization’s marketing, branding, and PR efforts.
Klout
Klout has become a popular player in the social media analytics market since its launch in 2008. The thing that has made this platform unique is known as the “Klout Score.” Klout collects information on your various social profiles and then uses a special algorithm to derive a popularity score of 1 to 100. This Klout Score is based on how many people interact with the person or entity being measured, the probability of that person’s/entity’s content being shared, as well as the influence of that person’s/entity’s followers. Easy to understand graphs indicate how your Klout score has changed over the last 90 days and also where your influence comes from.
Klout has gotten a lot of attention for its innovative approach to advocating the critical importance of social influence. There have been detractors, who argue that the Klout Score is bogus and contrived. Nevertheless, the firm has made a big splash in the social media analytics industry. Books have even been written about the Klout factor.
For all-around innovativeness and market influence Klout is hard to beat and can play a key role in the growth and branding of your small business. Perhaps the best part of Klout is that it’s free!
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an award-winning social media management tool designed for businesses and individuals to manage their accounts across the most popular social networks. The platform originally grew out of the need to help manage multiple social media networks from one convenient location. With Hootsuite you can adjust and fine-tune your online brands and submit messages to a variety of social media services, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Mixi. The platform has grown immensely in popularity by providing an easy and intuitive way to organize, execute, and monitor complete campaigns for a number of social media platforms all from one place.
Hootsuite is ideal for businesses. With the Hootsuite’s Analytics tools, you can provide customized social media reports for clients showing how much their awareness, engagement, and influence have increased over a given period of time.
Plans and pricing for HootSuite are very reasonable. There’s a free version that supports up to 3 profiles and has limited analytic information. More detailed reports are offered in the Pro version and start at just $8.99/per month, including a 30 day free trial. And the Enterprise version is available for more advanced businesses and agencies.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. The value of this tool is that instead of monitoring the whole web it concentrates on social media sites. As a small business you can choose to focus on particular areas relevant to your brands and services. By looking at particular keywords, you can get real-time information on related users, hashtags and more. Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure in real-time what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
TwitSprout
Given the importance of the Twittersphere, it’s safe to say that Twitter analysis has become a formidable niche within the world of social media analytics. Twitter provides invaluable insights into consumer perspectives on brands, products, and services and smart businesses today will be on the frontline gleaning this data. TwitSprout is a great tool for enabling small business to provide real-time competitive intelligence on all your Twitter traffic, including analytics on tweets, replies, mentions, and hashtags. With TwitSprout you can convert your analytics data to solid reports for later review as well as find out why some tweets drive more engagement
The real value of TwitSprout is in monitoring how many followers you’ve gained or lost in the past week. You can use the “Hourly Change in Followers” and “Daily Tweets” to get a real sense of what time of the day and on what days you should be tweeting to get the most influence with your followers. TwitSprout is a free service; all you have to do is signup!
