Apr

25th

2010

Analysing social media marketing without Google Analytics.

posted in: Social Media by: Paul Anthony

As I’ve already discussed in the series, there are a number of ways to monitor the results from your marketing efforts, via Google Analytics, but unfortunately – these tools don’t give context. Social networks are more and more giving us the data back to make informed decisions, but with the more closed platforms – data mining is hard. We need access to this data to make informed decisions about time and monetary spend on social media campaign’s performance.

There’s no way to know from G.A. if the conversations, or links being shared via social media are positive – or negative, or to work out whether you audience contains influencers that you should be conversing with that already engaged with you. Thankfully, there are loads of tools out there to watch these conversations as they occur, both commercial and free – here’s a collection of some of the best out there, to help you measure, monitor and analyse your social media presence without using Google Analytics directly.

Trendistic

URL: http://trendistic.com/

Trendistic graphs Twitter mentions over time , allowing you to see if brand terms have increased as a result of your marketing efforts on the platform or not. As I mentioned earlier it would be really nice to expand this out to the other services on the web to really get a feel visually of mentions that are happening out there. Still the data that is provided is accurate, and you can monitor trends in real time.

TweetMeme

URL: http://tweetmeme.com

The web is changing, and influence, reach and interaction are fast becoming the new backlink. In any case, the more retweets or shares a user receives, the more their voice is being heard with that network, and the more chance the content they share has of being seen. TweetMeme concentrate on showcasing the top retweeted stories in the past 24 hours, organised. This is useful for two reasons – firstly it lets you see who is being mentioned, and secondly it allows you to understand the type of links being shared. Knowing this may help you emulate and understand what makes content more likely to become viral.

AppSpot Spy

URL: http://spy.appspot.com

Spy is an aggregated social content feed, which runs on Google’s Application Architecture AppEngine. Whilst this is similar to the social media dashboard I’ve previously talked about, as an application its main advantage is the RSS feed of activity under a keyword, combining all of the social media mentions into one feed. Uses some of the infrastructure of other tools here, and combines their data in one place.

TweetEffect

URL: http://www.tweeteffect.com/

Wondering what content makes people follow and unfollow you? TweetEffect gives you a breakdown of the tweets that caused you to lose followers and the content that resulted in new followers. It reminds me a bit of Qwitter, which emails you when a user unfollows (along with the associated message) – but also reports on the positive / successful messages as well. If you are running a campaign that is being managed by different people, with different content styles it does allow you to get a feel for what sort of content is improving your brand reach.

WhosTalkin

URL: http://www.whostalkin.com/

Who’s Talkin is another aggregator of feeds and scrapes from a selection of sites, giving you a combined picture of mentions across the social web at any one time. It is however vastly superior to the earlier mentioned Appspot Spy application, providing many more services to monitor. Images, video and content based services are all covered, as well as social bookmarking sites such as Delicious. Who’s talkin may be the warning system every website needs if their content is doing well within these sorts of networks, giving you the warning sign that your content is going hot, and your servers are in need of some extra love.

One minor gripe was that I couldn’t find an easy to use RSS feed, which would have been a nice additional touch – however the API is open to programmers to do so if they wish. I’ve also thought that graphing of mentions over time for these sorts of apps would also be an additional extra that is relatively easy to implement, with benefits for the userbase. However all in all, a very nice application that could well have other uses for creative developers not scared to get into the API – well worth a look for monitoring the social media sphere.

Tweet Stats

URL: http://tweetstats.com/

Tweet Stats gives some really nice graphs and stats on frequency (tweets per day), tweet density (time of day that you tweet most often) and who you retweet most often. They use some of the libraries mentioned in my graphing solutions post to great effect, and its a great little service if you are looking to create some quick infographics about Twitter usage. This can be also be useful to find the network of people connected to major influencers, and when they are likely to notice your own tweets, based on their own patterns.

You can also see what twitter clients are more popular than others and a tweet cloud of the words most frequently used tweets for particular users. Of particular interest to me was tweetstats trends, which can give another indicator of what is happening across the web as a whole.

Twitturly

URL: http://twitturly.com/

Twitturly allows you again to monitor in real time the popular links being shared on Twitter at any one time. However, it also includes the most popular Images (including TwitPics) , Video and recent News. Being able to separate out the content that you tweet that is image , video or just regular tweets is useful addition to your social media analytics toolkit. User profiles allows you to see the links that you share, and the aggregate users who also tweet the same which can also identify users in the same mindset as yourself.

TwitAlyzer

URL: http://www.twitalyzer.com/

Twitalyzer features over a dozen reports including sentiment analysis, tagging, integration with Google Analytics and click-tracking.

They cover nearly 30 metrics and measures that are important indicators of a user’s behavior in Twitter, and report on important factors such as Impact, which works out

1) The number of followers a user has
2) The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter
3) The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted
4) The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people
5) The relative frequency at which the user posts updates

Engagement which is defined as “a measure of the type of interaction the user has in Twitter by examining the ratio of people referenced by the user to the number of people referencing them.”

Influence which is defined as the likelihood that a Twitter user will either A) retweet something the user has written or B) reference the user. While this definition is similar to clout, influence takes both retweets and references into account, whereas clout only looks at references.

Klout

URL: http://www.klout.com

Klout analyse your social graph in a similar way to TwitAlyzer, providing you with an overall influencer score. Whilst similar in nature to TwitAlyzer, Klout concentrates on influence within particular topics, allowing you to find easily the influencers in your niche. Other useful features including the provision of a “save to Twitter list” function, which in one swoop collects the people you should be communicating with into a list for you. When processing your own username, you can find the people who influence you, and the people whom you influence – and by my reconing this seemed pretty accurate.

Klout also shows a graph of what kind of Tweeter are you, putting different types of user into different boxes.

FavStar.FM

URL: http://favstar.fm

FavStar FM allows you to find the favourite tweets that others make of your content. It makes for interesting reading, as this is something that isn’t already available in Twitter’s main interface. You can start to get a feel for the things which you’ve tweeted which have made the difference to others – and that’s what its all about! – Interaction is the new backlink. You can also easily see what content other people find favourable amongst your competitors as well – which makes it a must see tool for Twitter. Its also a lot of fun seeing what the top tweets that got favourited are!

BackTweets

URL: http://backtweets.com/

Backtweets provide a genius little service that mines Twitter for links. If you’ve got a website, and want (read need) to know who is sharing your content around, BackTweets is the perfect way to do this, providing an RSS feed for searches for links across Twitter. It’s a relatively trivial matter to get this RSS feed to email, should you feel more comfortable in monitoring your social media marketing efforts in this way.

BackType

URL: http://backtype.com/

From the creators of the above mentioned tool, BackType offers comment searches across the web, allowing you to collate the conversations you are having on other people’s sites, and turn them into an RSS feed. If you think of comments as a reflection of your persona – and something that you simply can’t hide from, having the ability to collate these in one place is of great benefit.

You can begin to understand your competitors even more, by reading the sort of comments that they leave, and you can be assured that no one is hijacking your website’s good name, and commenting on your behalf all by monitoring the conversations via BackType. It also has the benefit of reminding you about conversations you’ve partook in, and may need to return to, as often a comment conversation can take things out of context.

Bitly.Pro

URL: http://bitly.pro/

I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited into the bitly.pro service which introduces a unique real-time dashboard that will provides you with even more information than the standard bit.ly service. It’s a real-time view of how your content is being distributed across networks like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and services like email, SMS, and instant messenger, and also allows a custom domain URL shortener.

A couple of others.

URL: http://twitter.grader.com/ – another influence tool

URL: http://twittercounter.com/ – watch your Twitter count over time.

URL: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social – Google’s social graph for you makes for interesting reading, sign in to your Google profile, and you get a feel for just how much they know about you.

URL: http://www.followfinder.googlelabs.com/ - another pretty interesting tool from Google, that again highlights how much attention the social graph is being paid to by them.

URL: http://likebutton.me – a great way to see content that is interesting on Facebook, from friends of yours.

Google have also recently got in on the game, with their “Updates” section. You can see from the video screencast below how to go about monitoring what is happening across both Facebook & Twitter – which is great considering that Facebook still feels ‘closed’ with regard to finding links shared by other people. Even though their OpenStream API was designed to allow access to this sort of data, currently their privacy settings keep some data under lock and key. No doubt this will be expanded upon within the Googleplex to contain even more data, and to profile social link profiles further to improve their search. Notice on the right “top links” – which is aggregated data from both networks.

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on monitoring social media campaigns. If you enjoyed this post, you might just like these:

Monitoring social media with Google Analytics

Segmenting social media with Google Analytics

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7 love filled opinions. What is yours?

linky

posted:April 28, 2010 1:09 pm

Excellent and very useful review. I haven’t used all of these by any means, so I’m looking forward to exploring the differences. I already rank klout above twittergrader myself, for example. I suppose I’ll discover shortly whether they are all free…