Caveat before I start: This is based on my experience of using analytics when assessing the effectiveness and value of social media presences I have managed, you may well know better tools and ways of doing things. If you do, add them in as a comment below!
There are hundreds of articles about measurement tools that are available to you so I’m not going to give you a blow by blow breakdown of each one, but these are the tools that I use on a regular basis. I’ve chosen them because they are:
- Easy to use
- Easy to access
- Free
- Give me the measurements that I want
Facebook Insights
Great free tool for admins of Facebook pages to see activity, likes, unlikes and engagement from your fans. Not always 100% reliable, lots of things you wished it did but it doesn’t (Offering your engagement scores over a longer period of time for example) but it is free, and it is relatively extensive.
Facebook provides a decent guide on how to use insights.
Immediate stats available from all registered Facebook Pages giving you growth over periods of time, and charts giving you context of where your page sits in the ranks. They look to be expanding their remit to Twitter and Linkedin (And likely Google+) so watch this space.
Simply and quickly offers you a comparison graph for twitter handles. See anyone’s Twitter account growth. One of my favourites.
Free and paid for accounts available (Currently they are offering a month trial free for their premium account). Twoolr offers a comprehensive selection of tools to assess your Twitter performance. You can’t analyse your competitors though.
Particularly useful measurements:
- Tweet density
- Tweet type
- Follower increase
- unfollows per day (You can then click through to the tweets you made that day to try and work out why)
You can save up to 3 keywords for Archivist to track (You can pay to save more). Allows you to track a keyword over time in terms of mentions, influencers, words associated with the keyword and RTs vs new tweets.
This one has been around since the beginning of Twitter time and is well documented on the web. Offers a similar selection of stats as Twoolr and you can plug in your competitors to get the same data, but it takes forever (Make a cup of tea, in fact, cook dinner and come back to the screen) and you can’t drill down in detail.
The best known url shortener. There are hundreds about that all do a good job, but I’ve stuck with bit.ly because a)I like the interface, and b) add a + to the end of any bit.ly link and you can see the stats! Brilliant.
So, those are the tools I use regularly. Feel free to add in your suggestions in the comments below.
Want even more?
This wiki has over 200 tools and resources for measuring social media activity. If that won’t blow your stats mind, I’m not sure what will.