Social Media Analytics 101: 4 Articles, 1 Service

Social Media can be a nebulous mistress.  As entrepreneurs continue to use social media to connect with customers and collaborators, a new question has come into being: what are effective social media practices?  The fact is no one knows for certain, but there is a way to measure what is effective and what isn’t: social media analytics.  SM (Social Media) can be frustrating to manage without information helping get into your client’s heads.  Here We’ve compiled a review of the top four How To articles, plus one paid service that will take care of the headache for you.  Enjoy!

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.

8 Twitter Analytics Tools

twitter-tools1Here are 8 Twitter analytics tools suggested by Social Media Today:

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.