HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics, Mashable.com ♥♥♥♥♥ Five Heart Rating

This is a great starting point.  Its simple, quick to read, and provides lots of leads for those who want to deepen their understanding of analytics in a short time.  Topics include: understanding what you want to track,optimizing your existing analytics software, adding new analytics tools, aggregating your analytics, analyzing and engaging visitors, and further resources.

How to Measure and Track Social Media Activity, SEOROI.com ♥♥♥♥ Four Heart Rating

An orientation into the world of Social Media Analytics, this article uses the practices of people like Guy Kawasaki to get you started down the SM path.  Great list of resources at the end.

Social Media Analytics, webanalysis.blogspot.com ♥♥ Two Heart Rating

This guide differs from the others in that it explicitly defines the measurable elements involved in social media, as well as providing vision examples of analytics tools in action.  Another list of resources at the end.

Dear Avinash: Search / SEO Metrics & Analytics Questions + Answers, kaushik.net ♥♥♥♥♥ Five Heart Rating

Avinash Kaushik provides great, thoughful, high impact answers to various questions.  This is a great place to gain a basic understanding of SM analytics, as well as learn some advanced tricks.  For more advanced information be sure to check out  Five Sweet Web Analytics Resolutions To Kick It Up A Notch, another great article.  Kaushik has a great sense of humor, and uses off the wall visuals to keep things exciting.

Want to outsource you SM Analytics? Use ViralHeat.com

Viral Heat has monitoring plans starting at only $9.99 per month.  This will keep you up to date on the popularity and efficacy of you social media campaigns.  Visit the site, or watch the video to learn more.

I hope this provides you with a toe-hold to begin in the Social Media Analytics world.  Who knows, maybe you’re the next Kevin Rose?

Have a question?  Post it to comments, I’ll do my best to answer.

From Ben Parr at Mashable

“Social media is a relatively new phenomenon, but Delicious (), Digg (), StumbleUpon () and other social media websites have become an increasingly important source of website traffic. This also creates a massive demand for data related to social media. Where are users coming from? What topics excite them? These are questions that, when answered, can be the difference between a successful website and a failed social media campaign. But social media analytics is young, and not many people know where to start.

Read Ben’s guide which is designed “to help you get started with some of the best tools and habits so that you can effectively gather and analyze social media analytics.”

Read more

Social Media

SocialMention.com allows you to easily track 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 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

KeoTag.com searches some of the most popular social media sites for tags that match your search term.

BackType is a “conversational search engine”. They index conversations scattered across the web to make following comments on a post or article a lot easier to manage.

CoComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response.

YackTrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content.

Blog Flux is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.

Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet.

Twitter

Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through the Twittersphere.

Backtweets finds all Tweets linking back to an article or blog post. Site does a good job of archiving older tweets where tweetmeme only shows more recent tweets.

Twitrratr helps you distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

Tweetmeme is similar to Backtweets except it only shows tweets that link to a post from the last 7 days.

Facebook

Facebook Lexicon lets you compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term on Facebook each day.

Discussion Boards and Forums

BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards.

BoardTracker is a search engine that only displays information from their extensive database of forum threads.

Blogs

Blog Search is a Google search technology focused on blogs. You can do a lot of the normal advanced Google search commands to get optimal results.

BlogPulse is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere

Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. It organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time up to three months ago up to today.

A Little Something Extra

I’ve been using the free version of FiltrBoxG2 which has been amazing. It’s very slick and easy to use. I highly recommend checking it out, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Jonathan Bishop is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Magicomm, LLC in Amesbury, MA.  He specializes in Web 2.0 technologies.

1. Twitalyzer: a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

2. MicroPlaza: a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people we follow on Twitter. MicroPlaza delivers the filtered links from our Twitter timelines. It’s a discovery engine and a personal newswire.

3. Twist: a way to see trends of keywords or product names, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. See frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph.

4. Twitturly:  tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

5. TweetStats: shows tweeting behavior of Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs.

6. TwitterFriends: explore the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you, see who among your Twitter friends are online at any moment, read stats about your own Twitter account and identify the Twitterers posting the most links.

7. Quickrate / Thummit: harvests the rich content of the Twittersphere to synthesize opinions on hot topics of the day (recent movies, buzzing memes).

8. TweetEffect: enter your twitter name and analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those up that made people follow or leave you.

1. Easy self-service set up of topics and queries.
2. Efficient filtering of topics.
3. Delivery of results in real-time.
4. Sentiment analysis.
5. Trending Data.
6. Comparison to competitive information.
7. Identification of conversation “themes” around a topic.
8. Identification of Influencers or “influential posts.”
9. Demographic Information.
10. Respond to and track engagement.

Read more