Social Media for your business is not a hobby. It’s not something you do online once in a while when you have a spare 5 minutes. Social Media is a serious online marketing tool, in which time and money should be invested, and through which at the end of the day, you receive a Return On your Investment.
Marketing is changing, and will never be the same again. Especially online marketing. Just because it’s “free” to use and update Social Media Networks, does not mean that you do not treat it like any other marketing avenue, where your results and efforts should be tracked and monitored. Then you know where you are, how you are doing, and can plan where you want to go.
To lend a hand, there are various software, tools and websites popping up to help business owners and marketing professionals track and monitor their social media progress.
Let’s have a look at a few:
1. Trackur
Trackur is an online reputation & social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.
Pricing: No Free Option. $18/ month – $377/ month
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social allows businesses to efficiently and effectively manage & grow their social presence across multiple channels and turn social connections into loyal customers.
The web application integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics and more – all in a package that’s intuitive and easy to use.
Pricing: Free 30 Day Trial, then $9/month or $49/month
3. Klout
The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engage audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.
Pricing: FREE
4. My Next Customer
MyNextCustomer helps marketing teams and agencies measure calls and leads from Paid Search, SEO, Social, and Offline campaigns, integrates Google Analytics with phone calls, calculates return on ad spend, and puts sales and marketing on the same page.
Pricing: 14 Day Free Trial, then $49/month up to $999/month
5. BrandWatch
Brandwatch is one the world’s leading tools for monitoring and capturing social media. We successfully service customers all across the globe from FTSE 100 companies to SMEs, helping them discover, understand and respond to the comments made about them by users across all forms of social media.
Pricing: Possibly expensive, and aimed at large companies, because they have no prices on their website, and you have to contact them for a demo.
6. Webfluenz
We are experts in Data-Mining, Natural Language Processing and Communications. Our products are proprietary, developed in-house by a team of dedicated engineers, designers, statisticians, market research and marketing professionals.
At webfluenz we are committed to providing actionable business, sales and customer intelligence from online Social Media and the Real Time web.
Pricing: From $89/month to $4,299/ month.
7. Buzz Numbers
Web Based Software – BuzzNumbers is a full Software as a Service solution, meaning there are no software or IT costs and instant access to our service. BuzzNumbers can be accessed from any browser on the web and is easy to use with no training required.
Pricing: from $800/month to $1,000/month
8. Viralheat
Viralheat is a social measurement platform designed with simplicity and ease in mind. Built from the ground up to be timely and efficient, Viralheat allows users to easily comprehend social media.
Viralheat aims to be a one stop shop for understanding social media. Today, Viralheat covers hundreds of viral video destination sites, Twitter, and millions blogs & websites.
Pricing: 7 Day Free Trial, then $9.99/month to $89.99/ month.
9. Social Report
Social Report is a social network analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your social space and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your data in an entirely new way.
With Social Report you’re more aware of your social space, its demographics, sentiment, location and behavioral patterns. Social Report also offers you a range of tools to help with marketing campaigns, conversion tracking as well as with semantic analysis of your social data.
Pricing: 30 Day Free Trial, then $9/month to $79/month
10. 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.
It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
Pricing: FREE
11. BackType
BackType is a marketing intelligence company that develops products and services that help companies understand their social impact.
BackType has built the most powerful system in the world to analyze social data. We also power social features for over 100 companies including The New York Times, SlideShare, Automattic (creators of WordPress), Bitly and more.
Pricing: FREE
12. Compete
Compete helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading advertisers, agencies and publishers rely on Compete’s products and services to create engaging online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns.
Compete’s online panel—the largest in the industry—makes the web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people’s lives.
Pricing: FREE (limited), or $199/month to $499/month
13. Dialogix
Dialogix is an Australian social media monitoring tool that shows you what is being said about your brand, industry and competitors in Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites, forums, and much more. More than just software, it’s a service with human moderators and dashboard access tracking sentiment, creating a database of influencers and allowing you keep on top of the buzz with email and RSS alerts.
Pricing: Free Trial, then $199/month to $1,950/month
14. Alterian SM2
Alterian empowers organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences with their audience that help build value and reinforce commitment to their brand. A leading international integrated marketing platform provider, Alterian’s unprecedented integration of analytics, content and execution through industry leading tools enables companies to build integrated communication strategies for a more personalized customer experience.
Alterian continues to demonstrate the ability to quickly adapt to the new market trends over time with our agile software solutions. Our Alterian Customer Engagement Platform that provides marketers with a measurable return on investment (ROI) in a simple, user-friendly interface.
Pricing: From $500/ month
Do you currently track your social media business efforts? What kind of R.O.I are you getting? Or do you know any other cool websites or software tools?
buzzref.com helps you to analyze your marketing efforts on Facebook and track your competition. Check the power of a Facebook business page
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 2, 2011 at 10:50 am | Permalink
@Swatantra negi, Hi Swatantra
Thanks for sharing another tool for tracking your social media, especially Facebook. I had a quick look and the results look a little like Facebook Insights, but I guess it becomes more interesting when you use the comparison tool.
@Fiona McEachran,
Hi fiona,
You are absolutely correct that its result are similar to Facebook insight but the best part of this tool is the competition tracking. you can track your competitors activity also by this tool which is not possible otherwise.
Twitter: netchunks
April 29, 2011 at 5:05 pm | Permalink
Hi Fiona,
This is really a great list. I use SocialMention, Backtype and Klout for tracking my social media stats specifically because they are free but I am surely going to try to check out the trail versions of the paid ones you have mentioned. I think by monitoring the social media stats one can easily come to know what he is doing right or wrong with his social media marketing strategies.
Regards,
Shiva
Shiva @ Blogging Ideas´s last [type] ..The Ultimate List of Premium WordPress Theme Providers
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 2, 2011 at 10:54 am | Permalink
@Shiva @ Blogging Ideas, Hi Shiva,
Thanks for your feedback on our list of tools. I’m happy to hear you are already using some of these, so you must find them helpful.
Yes, I think monitoring social media stats is part of the whole strategy of using social media for business. It all starts with planning, and determining what you want to achieve from your time with social media.
Then you can use the stats to see if you are on target to achieve your goals or not.
It’s no brainer to see that social media is here to stay for good. Given vast variety of the existing channels to choose and stick with, it’s time for such a hot space to enter into a new category. There is a need for a portal to provide a quick and intelligent decision for both the consumer and the enterprise about their online connections.
A Platform to Help us to Distinguish Our Quality vs. Quantity Friends, Fans, Followers, and Companies
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Flickr and others have been doing a decent job of providing additional marketing exposure and even in some cases, additional revenue. However, as more and more social networking sites pop up, how do you manage your brand across all these channels? Maybe more importantly, which one of these sites should you select as the one that will help you best reach your target audience? The proliferation of the social media avenues is becoming overwhelming.
This glut of information reminds me of the early 90’s when WWW was adopted broadly by the general public. Every company rushed to have a presence, to the point it became literally impossible to find the right information on the Web. That’s when a better generation of search engines – at first the Yahoo! and then Google – entered the market and helped us find the most relevant information by just typing simple keywords in their search box. If you had asked before Google launched, if there was a need for another search engine – most would have said no, we already have those….
Then came Web 1.0 & 2.0 – Youtube, Flickr, myspace, Facebook, Twitter and countless others have turned everyday people into content producers, influencers and experts. We basically tripled down on the information overload How do you know which channels to select for deploying your social media strategy? How do you know which one is the right channel to let your fans and followers to find you, your products, and services? Most importantly, who is Joe Smith that is recommending that person, that company, that product?
I hope my awesomize.me can accomplish such a mission. The site is not another social networking platform. Yet the portal to all your existing social media channels. The platform helps you, your fans, your potential clients to make an intelligent decision as to which company to connect to or follow via which social media channels and why? It’s free!
Elias
CEO & Founder
http://awesomize.me
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 2, 2011 at 11:56 am | Permalink
@Elias Shams, Hi Elias,
Wow, that’s gotta be close to one of the longest comments in history!
I’m going to check out Awesomize me, to see if it’s interesting…
Hi Fiona, thank you so much for recommending Trackur. I would like to add that we do in fact have a free version of Trackur, you can find details here: http://www.trackur.com/free-brand-monitoring-tools
Thanks again!
Andy Beal
CEO, Trackur
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 2, 2011 at 12:04 pm | Permalink
@Andy Beal, Hi Andy
Thanks for taking the time to visit our blog, and share with us the free version of Trackur. I’m not sure how I missed that on your website…
Hello Fiona – I love resource articles like this, and you’ve done a nice roundup of general social media tracking tools. As this industry develops, I think we’re going to see specialized tools for specialized niches emerge – allowing managers to gather specific insights that help them in their unique businesses.
For example, I work in the hotel industry with ReviewPro, which provides a reputation monitoring and social media management solution exclusively for hotels:
[Free version] http://www.reviewpro.com/free
In the hotel business, there are a lot of measures around guest satisfaction and competitor benchmarking that wouldn’t apply outside the industry. And this is true for many segments.
It’s interesting to watch this develop – so thanks again for the article!
Josiah
Josiah Mackenzie´s last [type] ..Meet ReviewPro at the Arabian Travel Market ATM 2011 in Dubai
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 3, 2011 at 2:00 pm | Permalink
@Josiah Mackenzie, Hi Josiah,
Thanks for your feedback, and I’m happy to hear you liked the roundup. It’s funny that you mentioned the future development of specialized industry social media tools, since only last week I suggested this possibility in a discussion in a LinkedIn group.
I’m not surprised that a product like ReviewPro exists, because the hotel industry is so huge, and customers who stay in hotels are ESPECIALLY vocal. I can even relate to this personally, since I’ve been writing hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, long before social media networks even kicked off.
The future tools are going to be interesting to watch, especially as more and more people start using these and start reviewing the tools and sharing feedback.
Twitter: mseibert
May 3, 2011 at 12:06 am | Permalink
You could have added TwentyFeet to your list:
TwentyFeet is a metrics aggregator for all your social media and web property metrics from the web. It pulls and generates metrics from: twitter, facebook, bit.ly, YouTube, Google Analytics, MySpace. friendfeed, RSS-Feeds and many more to come. Further, it displays them in a slick interface all in one place and nudges you, whenever something noteworthy happens. And the best is the pricing: Each account is $2.49 (USD) per year. One account each with twitter and facebook is for free forever.
https://www.twentyfeet.com
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 3, 2011 at 2:04 pm | Permalink
@Martin Seibert (TwentyFeet), Hi Martin,
Thank you for mentioning another tracking tool – TwentyFeet. It sounds like an interesting option, and certainly very affordable.
Twitter: Ileane
May 3, 2011 at 7:55 pm | Permalink
Hey Fiona, great list of monitoring tools. I’ve tried most of the free ones and SocialMention is one of my favorites so far. I like HyperAlerts too for Facebook. I’ve had TwentyFeet on my to do list for a few days – I heard Mari Smith talking about it in a webinar. This is a great reminder to sign-up for it – and all the other freebies too!
Thanks Fiona, have a great day!
Ileane´s last [type] ..The Best Social Media Apps
Twitter: abnormalmarket
May 5, 2011 at 11:27 am | Permalink
@Ileane, Hi Ileane,
Thanks for your comment. I’m happy to hear you like the free ones. Even though they are free, they are quite cool and handy. Yes, I used to use HyperAlerts on Facebook, but now Facebook has started sending updates themselves when someone comments, so I’m not using it anymore.
Yes, TwentyFeet looks interesting.
As part of a Facebook training product I’m creating, I have done video reviews Sprout Social and Social Report. Both of these look like excellent tracking tools. I definitely think businesses should be using more comprehensive stats, and tracking their efforts.
Hi Fiona,
Nice list there.I really like the concept of the Klout.I am certainly going to use it to experience how the rating is actually carried out.
Shivam Garg´s last [type] ..Save On Software-Triple Coupon Style
Twitter: ExtremeJohn
May 18, 2011 at 12:38 am | Permalink
I am currently using Klout in analyzing my social media stats. I love the service. I’m glad it’s also one of your top SEO tracking tools.
Extreme John´s last [type] ..Business Blitz- Social Media Apps- Tech Tools and Marketing Ideas
Hello, Fiona. Thanks for listing the tracking tools. I use the free ones: Klout and SocialMention to track my social media statistics. Both of them work very well. I’m about to use the paid ones as you suggested in the article. I think it will work better.
Andrew Walker´s last [type] ..Nature’s Inventory Coupon Code
Hi Fiona,
This comes a tad bit late but we wanted to thank you for recommending webfluenz. We are also excited to announce our launch of an all new engagement system, complete with customisable columns and workspaces. For further details, please visit the following link http://webfluenz.com/selfserve_engage.pl. Thanks once again.
Regards,
Aditi