SCORE BIG!Here is how to turn your social media
activity into real-world rewards.
By Tracy (DiMarino) Lewis | Posted September 18, 2012 | 14 Comment(s) | Filed in: Social Media, Technology
Two years ago (August 2010), we published a Social Media Monitoring Tools Comparison Guide, which included a free downloadable spreadsheet that compared 8 popular solutions side-by-side, based on 21 decision-impacting factors.
Designed to help brands and agencies easily determine the best tool for their social media monitoring needs, the post was a huge hit. In fact, it remains one of our most-viewed posts of all time, and the spreadsheet is still downloaded today.
Because of its popularity, we decided it’s time to release an updated version of the database with the most recent pricing, coverage and feature information, also including some new tools. (Note: data as of summer 2012; demos were held with all providers between June 1 and August 31.)
9 Social Media Monitoring Tools EvaluatedWe assessed tools against the same criteria as our original report—price, breadth of coverage, keyword and search result limits, analysis and reporting capabilities, workflow management and more. This time, however, we limited our analysis to paid tools:
Keep in mind that the perfect solution for one organization may not be the best choice for another. The goal of this comparison is to help you determine which solutions may be worth further evaluation for your organization based on business needs, budget and goals.
For example, if you get a lot of mentions and need detailed reporting mechanisms, then Radian6 or Lithium Technologies may be the best fits. But, if you want to tie social into an overall marketing campaign, and don't have a highly discussed brand, HubSpot or Buzzstream are likely better suited for your needs.
What Tools Do You Use for Social Media Monitoring?
What do you use to monitor your brand and industry online, and aid in community management? What do you love or hate about it?
Please share your insight in the comments below.
Stay updated: Subscribe to the PR 20/20 blog, check us out on Facebook or follow the team on Twitter.
Popular Today in Social: All Popular Articles It's not totally complete, but pretty close to it, and I find myself referring to this helpful infographic from Lunametrics frequently. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest all have the opportunity for you to attract people to your brand and content, by adding compelling visuals and images.
54 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools [Update2012]Tags: Buzz Monitoring, Digg, Facebook, facebook monitoring tool, facebook monitoring tools, forum monitoring, free social media monitoring, free social media monitoring tool, free social media monitoring tools, free social media tools, free social media tracking, Google alerts, message board tracking, social media management tools free 2011, social media Monitoring, social media monitoring free, social media monitoring tools, social media monitoring tools free, social media tools, social media trends, Social Web Analytics, technorati, Twitter monitoring, twitter tools
If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need social media monitoring tools. Before you reach for your wallet and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you will get an understanding of what is available and if you need any paid services.
I have collected 54 free social media monitoring tools. In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go:
Group A
Twitter account: HootSuite
Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics. Draft and schedule messages to send at a time your audience is most likely to be online. HootSuite has the dashboard for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.
Twitter account: socialmention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. It allows you to 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 over one hundred social media sites.
Twitter account: socialpointer
SocialPointer is a real-time social media marketing platform for marketing agencies and individuals, It enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversation. SocialPointer lets you monitor, listen, respond and engage.
Twitter account: socialseek
Get all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos, and more on any topic you want in one place. There’s a Socialseek site for everything and you can even make your own. I found some of the news sources other tools missed.
Twitter account: Twitter
Twitter Counter is the number one site to track your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.
Twitter account: wildfireapp
Measure your performance. Glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.
Twitter account: SocialBro
Get accurate information about your community using different search criteria that will help you to make strategic and error-free decisions. Take advantage of knowing exactly who shapes your community: where your followers are from, which language they speak, their activity on Twitter, etc.
Twitter account: klout
Klout’s mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence. Klout measures influence in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers.Group B
Twitter account: addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and get info on what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. You can personalize your results dashboard and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search. News pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more.
Twitter account: argylesocia
We provide software to help your organization participate in conversations with prospects and customers, drive brand awareness, and integrate social media deeply throughout your organization. And behind the scenes, we crunch your social activity through our big data engine to provide you with the most actionable social intelligence in the business.
Twitter account: antavopromotion
Antavo is a web-based marketing software to build intelligent promotions. Supporting multiple platforms it helps to convert online traffic into paying customers without real IT knowledge. It improves add efficiency and increases lead generation.
Twitter account: boardreader
BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.
Twitter account: cotweet
Free version is for individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations. Free version includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications containing your latest mentions, team collaboration tools and access to Twitter follower profiles.
Twitter account: Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard software that helps you monitor and analyze data scattered across all your online services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Facebook, WordPress and more from one single location in real-time.Twitter account: edgerankchecker
EdgeRank is an algorithm that ranks objects in the Facebook News Feed. Pages with high EdgeRank Scores will be more likely to show up in the news feed, than Pages with low EdgeRank Scores.
Twitter account: facebook
Facebook search is notoriously bad and will not find much, but if you have nothing else to do then give it a shot. It relies heavily on your social graph so the results you get may not be meaningful for your target audience.
Twitter account: followerwonk
Followerwonk is a cool new social media analytics tool for Twitter. You can use this free social media tool to search for influential bloggers for a variety of activies including blogger outreach.
Twitter account: Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.
Twitter account: Google
Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs. The blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results.
Twitter account: gtrendz
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.
Twitter account: howsociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
Twitter account: icerocket
Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.Twitter account: Kred
Kred is a social-media scoring system that seeks to measure a person’s online influence.Kred, which was created by the San Francisco-based social analytics firm PeopleBrowsr, attempts to also measure a person or company’s engagement, or as they call it, outreach. PeopleBrowsr hopes that that combination can offer a more informed metric for non-celebrities like entrepreneurs and those whom they follow and look to for advice.
Twitter account: asterisqdataviz
Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.
Twitter account: monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.Twitter account: nearbytweets
Nearby Tweets is a geography-centric Twitter tool (localizing Twitter) for social networking, building customer relationships, and monitoring real-time buzz.
Monitor and analyze everything on a single platform with Netvibes. Now you can eliminate noise and get smarter, more relevant results by combining powerful adaptive analytics with expert human curation. And unlike “black box” analytics, our Open Corpus keeps you in complete control, while our award-winning SmartReader makes it easy to monitor hundreds of sources in real-time
Twitter account: NutshellMail
NutshellMail lets you organize, monitor, and interact with all your social networks from a consolidated email digest delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. Nutshellmail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning.
Twitter account: omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.
Twitter account: Pinerly
Pinerly.com is the easiest way to market your visual content onto social media sites, starting with Pinterest. Users can schedule pins, receive real time analytics on which pins are most effective, use multiple accounts, and bookmark. The company also churns out best practices data for content creators and brands on the platform.
Twitter account: samepoint
SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place across in blogs and social media sites. SamePoint converts discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. SamePoint can serve as the nexus where the conversations meet, providing a single place for all discussions on a specific topic.
Twitter account: seesmic
Seesmic is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build their brands online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins. Seesmic gives you social media monitoring, updating and engaging in real time.
Twitter account: yahelc
Track your shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a web address of a page and find out how much it has been shared in different social networking and bookmarking sites. Currently includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and StumbleUpon.
Twitter account: socialoomph
Schedule tweets, track keywords, extended Twitter profiles, save and reuse drafts, view @mentions and retweets, purge your DM inbox, personal status feed — your own tweet engine, unlimited accounts.
Twitter account: steprep
StepRep provides an overview of the conversations people are having about your business online. Anytime your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you’ll hear about it. Sources are scanned continuously to bring you the most complete and up-to-date data on how your business is perceived. The data is broken down and analyzed in reports that can help you target your marketing and increase your online customer engagement.
Twitter account: surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.Twitter account: technorati
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site. It is not a very good tool for lesser known blogs as it misses a lot of great sites.
Twitter account: tinker
Tinker helps you stay on top of your favorite events by showing you the latest buzz from Twitter and across the social web. Create or follow an event stream by choosing a keyword. An event could be anything: the Oscars, a new iPhone release, a movie premiere, a book launch, or a Superbowl party. Tinker also lets you search for the top news, topics and places people are talking about.
Twitter account: twittiptop
TipTop Search is a Twitter-based search engine that helps you discover the best and most current advice, opinions, answers for any search, and also real people to directly engage and share experiences with. A search on any topic reveals people’s emotions and experiences about it, as well as other concepts that they are discussing in connection with the original search.
Twitter account: topsy
Topsy is a real-time search engine. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain. Topsy’s algorithms identify influencers for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. It displays results for related terms and articles, trending topics, identifies experts (influencers) and shows you trackback pages for everything in its index.Twitter account: twazzup
Twazzup is real-time news platform. It allows you to filter the news out of live Twitter content. It’s useful for understanding who are the influencers on a given topic and what are to trending sources.
Twitter account: tweetbeep
Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions.
Twitter account: TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform. Created by Dan Zarrella.
Twitter account: tweetreachapp
TweetReach measures the impact of social media conversations. Use it to understand how many people were reached by tweets about a topic on Twitter.
Twitter account: waggeneredstrom
The twendz Twitter-mining Web application uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. Using the twendz application gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.
Twitter account: TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet is an “egotracking” service that will help you keep track of your own social media activities and monitor your results. We aggregate metrics from different services, thus giving you the full picture of what happens around you on the web – all in one place.
Twitter account: Twitalyzer
Analytics for social relationships. Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where they live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts. Twitalyzer provides Twitter’s most robust benchmark reporting, ranking Twitter users ten different ways. Authored by Eric T. Peterson author and blogger.
Twitter account: twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.
Twitter account: grader
Twitter Grader lets you check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your Twitter username and you’ll get an instant grade and report. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.
Twitter account: twitter
Use Twitter Search if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. Twitter Search lets you search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. Advanced Search allows you to create your queries using many advanced operators.
Twitter account: JeffClark
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the ‘@’ symbol to see the latest tweets from that user.
Twitter account: whathashtag
WhatHashtag is service that allows you to find the most used Twitter hashtags for the keywords you enter. Search for the keyword and you will automatically get the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss your topic. The result retrieves the last 1.000 tweets related to your keyword, and orders hashtags by frequency of use. Using WhatHashtag you will gain visibility when tweeting your opinions, being read beyond your followers in the most effective way.
Twitter account: whounfollowedme
Who.unfollowed.me is a service that helps you track your unfollowers, in real time, without waiting for a DM, or email. It allows you to check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes, without waiting for an email or a direct message.That’s all folks. If you know of a great free tool then please let us know in the comments.
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Posted on: July 16, 2012
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48 Free Social Media Monitoring ToolsTags: Buzz Monitoring, Digg, Facebook, facebook monitoring tool, facebook monitoring tools, forum monitoring, free social media monitoring, free social media monitoring tool, free social media monitoring tools, free social media tools, free social media tracking, Google alerts, message board tracking, social media management tools free 2011, social media Monitoring, social media monitoring free, social media monitoring tools, social media monitoring tools free, social media tools, social media trends, Social Web Analytics, technorati, Twitter monitoring, twitter toolsIf you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need monitoring tools. Before you get out your credit card and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you get a taste of what is available and if you need paid services.
I have collected 48 free social media monitoring tools. In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go:
Group A
Twitter account: seesmic
Seesmic is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build their brands online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins. Seesmic gives you social media monitoring, updating and engaging in real time.Twitter account: HootSuite
Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics. Draft and schedule messages to send at a time your audience is most likely to be online. HootSuite has the dashboard for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.Twitter account: postrank
Postrank has two tools. The PostRank Analytics (https://analytics.postrank.com/) gives you insight about your sites engagement scores and. Social engagement analytics covers over 20 of the top social networks. Find out who are your influencers, which content drives engagement, what posts are most impostant. And the best part is that you can also monitor your comperirors. You can connect PostRank with your Google Analytics to get even better results. PostRanks top ranked content (http://www.postrank.com/main) helps you to find most important blogs on any topic, use it to monitor your competitionTwitter account: socialmention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. It allows you to 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 over one hundred social media sites.Twitter account: socialpointer
SocialPointer is a real-time social media marketing platform for marketing agencies and individuals, It enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversation. SocialPointer lets you monitor, listen, respond and engage.Twitter account: socialseek
Get all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos, and more on any topic you want in one place. There’s a Socialseek site for everything and you can even make your own. I found some of the news sources other tools missed.Twitter account: twazzup
Twazzup is real-time news platform. It allows you to filter the news out of live Twitter content. It’s useful for understanding who are the influencers on a given topic and what are to trending sources.Twitter account: Twitter
Twitter Counter is the number one site to track your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.Twitter account: wildfireapp
Measure your performance. Glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.Group B
Twitter account: addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and get info on what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. You can personalize your results dashboard and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search. News pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more.Twitter account: blogpulse
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the world of blogs. Different searches include basic, advanced, trend, URL and conversation tracker.Twitter account: boardreader
BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.Twitter account: BoardTracker
Discover the influencers, monitor and protect your brand and reputation, find and engage your customers and critics. BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.Twitter account: cotweet
Free version is for individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations. Free version includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications containing your latest mentions, team collaboration tools and access to Twitter follower profiles.Twitter account: facebook
Facebook search is notoriously bad and will not find much, but if you have nothing else to do then give it a shot. It relies heavily on your social graph so the results you get may not be meaningful for your target audience.Twitter account: Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.Twitter account: Google
Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs. The blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results.Twitter account: gtrendz
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.Twitter account: howsociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.Twitter account: icerocket
Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.Twitter account: klout
Klout’s mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence. Klout measures influence in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers.Twitter account: asterisqdataviz
Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.Twitter account: monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.Twitter account: NutshellMail
NutshellMail lets you organize, monitor, and interact with all your social networks from a consolidated email digest delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. Nutshellmail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning.Twitter account: omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.Twitter account: quarkbase
You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.Twitter account: samepoint
SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place across in blogs and social media sites. SamePoint converts discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. SamePoint can serve as the nexus where the conversations meet, providing a single place for all discussions on a specific topic.Twitter account: yahelc
Track your shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a web address of a page and find out how much it has been shared in different social networking and bookmarking sites. Currently includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and StumbleUpon.Twitter account: socialoomph
Schedule tweets, track keywords, extended Twitter profiles, save and reuse drafts, view @mentions and retweets, purge your DM inbox, personal status feed — your own tweet engine, unlimited accounts.Twitter account: steprep
StepRep provides an overview of the conversations people are having about your business online. Anytime your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you’ll hear about it. Sources are scanned continuously to bring you the most complete and up-to-date data on how your business is perceived. The data is broken down and analyzed in reports that can help you target your marketing and increase your online customer engagement.Twitter account: surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.Twitter account: technorati
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site. It is not a very good tool for lesser known blogs as it misses a lot of great sites.Twitter account: tinker
Tinker helps you stay on top of your favorite events by showing you the latest buzz from Twitter and across the social web. Create or follow an event stream by choosing a keyword. An event could be anything: the Oscars, a new iPhone release, a movie premiere, a book launch, or a Superbowl party. Tinker also lets you search for the top news, topics and places people are talking about.Twitter account: twittiptop
TipTop Search is a Twitter-based search engine that helps you discover the best and most current advice, opinions, answers for any search, and also real people to directly engage and share experiences with. A search on any topic reveals people’s emotions and experiences about it, as well as other concepts that they are discussing in connection with the original search.Twitter account: topsy
Topsy is a real-time search engine. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain. Topsy’s algorithms identify influencers for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. It displays results for related terms and articles, trending topics, identifies experts (influencers) and shows you trackback pages for everything in its index.Twitter account: trendistic
Trendistic allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. This way, it shows how the frequency of one to four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what’s popular Twitter users. You can enter a phrase in the search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate: try comparing “skype” and “microsoft”(http://trendistic.com/skype/microsoft), to see how powerful it can be.Twitter account: tweetbeep
Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions.Twitter account: TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform. Created by Dan Zarrella.Twitter account: tweetreachapp
TweetReach measures the impact of social media conversations. Use it to understand how many people were reached by tweets about a topic on Twitter.Twitter account: waggeneredstrom
The twendz Twitter-mining Web application uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. Using the twendz application gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.Twitter account: Twitalyzer
Analytics for social relationships. Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where they live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts. Twitalyzer provides Twitter’s most robust benchmark reporting, ranking Twitter users ten different ways. Authored by Eric T. Peterson author and blogger.Twitter account: twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.Twitter account: grader
Twitter Grader lets you check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your Twitter username and you’ll get an instant grade and report. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.Twitter account: twitter
Use Twitter Search if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. Twitter Search lets you search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. Advanced Search allows you to create your queries using many advanced operators.Twitter account: JeffClark
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the ‘@’ symbol to see the latest tweets from that user.Twitter account: twitturly
Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. When someone tweets a URL, Twitturly 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.Twitter account: whathashtag
WhatHashtag is service that allows you to find the most used Twitter hashtags for the keywords you enter. Search for the keyword and you will automatically get the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss your topic. The result retrieves the last 1.000 tweets related to your keyword, and orders hashtags by frequency of use. Using WhatHashtag you will gain visibility when tweeting your opinions, being read beyond your followers in the most effective way.Twitter account: whounfollowedme
Who.unfollowed.me is a service that helps you track your unfollowers, in real time, without waiting for a DM, or email. It allows you to check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes, without waiting for an email or a direct message.That’s all folk. If you know of a great free tool then please let us know in the comments.
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Posted on: May 16, 2011
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Track, Compare and Improve PerformanceMeasure and maximize Social Media ROI
Analytics PRO offers sophisticated metrics and meaningful insights for Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Identify influencers, monitor engagement and track growth.
Analytics PRO makes it easy to spy on competitors and to benchmark performance against industry standards and regional norms.
Optimize your social media presence, increase engagement rates, and generate beautiful graphical reports using Analytics PRO.
By Bliss Hanlin, Community Manager at eModeration (and Pinner extraordinaire)
As Pinterest growth skyrockets, so follows the number of tools available to help us manage our content, understand our metrics, and be better pinners. Below are just a few of the tools and services now available for use with Pinterest that are especially handy for brands, marketers, and Pinterest devotees.
(Are we crazy for Pinterest? Little bit! For more from eModeration on Pinterest, try our look from a legal standpoint at the new Terms of Use going into effect April 6, our Everything Pinterest guide, and of course, eModeration's boards on Pinterest.)
General Use Tools
Official "Pin It" Pinterest Bookmarklet - sometimes the simplest answer is the best one. Pinterest offers a "Pin It" bookmarklet on its goodies page. Just right when you want to pin that, there and then be done.
Pin a Quote - a bookmarklet that turns a text quote into something pinable, although for a more alluring visual, you'll need to PayPal the creator for an upgrade to the Pro version. Reminiscent of how the Wall Street Journal is using quote presentation on Pinterest as lead-ins to articles and stories. We love this one - it is win-win-win for the Pinterest quote/inspiration loving community, the Pin/Board curator, and the original content author.
SpinPicks - for the curating weary, SpinPicks finds topical eye-candy across the web for your Pinning pleasure, and does its best to do so in a responsible digital citizen way by bypassing search link and aiming for original source material linking. SpinPicks is still in beta. We found it to be a little slow, and not being able to input a search topic was frustrating. But we do love the exploring aspect for Flickr CC licensed images. We're hoping for great things from SpinPicks in the future.
Enlarge Pin Images Tools
Pinterest Image Expander - a Google extension, Pinterest Image Expander takes the click out of viewing for the Pinterest surfer by expanding the image with an in-line view upon hover. This kind of tool is great for the repinners amongst us. This particular tool was created by a masterful small business pinner - Brian Noah of Noah Photography.
Pinterest Pro - the Swiss Army knife of Pinterest use tools, Pinterest Pro is a Google extension that adds the hover/zoom feature of Pinterest Image Expander (with an even larger expansion,) but also incorporates a "right click to pin" function and a quickie view of trending pins via a drop-down view from the extension toolbar. By Zach Allia, the maker of "Friendsheet for Facebook."
Screen Capture to Pin Tools
url2pin.it - an alternative to a bookmarklet, url2pin.it offer an easy interface for the casual user for presenting a full-screen capture. The source link pulls over in the description field. We liked how url2pin.it added a little touch of fancy, by presenting color mapping of the image along with (HTML color codes upon rollover) in a handsome color block at the bottom of the pic.
Screen 2 Pin - a Google extension by the makers of url2pin.it, with the same Pinterest-friendly screen capture result.
Snapito! - terrible name, great product. Snapito's "Pin Page" bookmarklet allow you to screen capture a website or landing page, and have that automatically turn into a pin - including the full-source URL into the description. We love responsible pinning, and that the URL is baked into the resulting pin is a big plus to us.
Pinstamatic - the makers of Snapito must have overheard us about that name, as they are working on a similar product that incorporates the screen grab tool, adds "sticky note" images for pinning text, and a Twitter profile card pin-maker. In the early stages, and they are looking for design help.
ShotPin - ShotPin's makers know that while a quick screengrab is handy, sometimes what is really needed is judicious cropping. Their Google extension offers capture and then crop, a functionality the other Capture to Pin tools should take note of. As much as we love cropping, the UX of this one was a little clumsy, and it does not automatically credit the source link. Quibbles, because the easy crop is fantastic.
Curation
Curalate - like some of the other companies in this category, Curalate has big plans, scaling to provide value to big brands by offering a monitoring, analytics, and brand intelligence platform focused on social curation. That's right, they see visual content curation as more than just a one-off, but a movement. Currently moving to an invitational beta, the team at Curalate would love to hear from more brands and agencies interested in getting a first look.
Percolate - overwhelmed by your content needs in general? Percolate is ready to take the whole kaboodle off your hands, make it tidy for you, then hand it back with a bow by using algorithms to learn a brand's taste and then surface relevant content in an organized way. The dashboard then reveals what kind of content resonates the most with the brand's different audiences. We assume with a kit as powerful as what they are describing, a little Pinterest action is not going to be a hardship. For brands that have high content output needs, a tool like Percolate makes a lot of sense.
Influence, Analytics and Metrics
PinReach - (formerly PinClout"), an analytics service that helps Pinterest users monitor trends and gauge their success on the site. We especially like the "trending pins" section. Fun for surfing.
Repinly - yet another influence tracker, Repinly has an attractive design but seems a little light on innovative features.
Pinpuff - one of the first pinfluence raters, Pinpuff is still going strong, with info about much your account is worth, along side reach, activity and virility scores. The PinPerks program is innovative, with business promoters exploring social influence via the platform.
Pintics - Pintics says it will provide a multiple account dashboard (we could really use this!) with with metrics included sales data. In closed beta, and an outgrowth of a hackathon.
Pinerly - promising to be the next best thing since sliced bread, we don't have access to this one yet. The streamlined dashboard is intriguing, as is the "schedule pins" feature. We didn't have the patience for the "Invite 10 friends and maybe we will show you a bigger screenshot of what you might someday be invited to join" game (and apparently, we aren't the only ones who feel that way), but possibly you have more stamina for that kind of thing than we do.
Google Analytics - "But wait!" you might be thinking to yourself. "Google Analytics does not belong in this list! If you are going to mention Google Analytics in relation to Pinterest, might as well stick in Photoshop! Or Ice Cream! Or my Aunt Maude!!" Well, we admit, we weren't going to include it, but then we found this brilliant explanation from Mashable about how to make Pinterest data jump through Google Analytics hoops, and knew we'd be doing a disservice by leaving it out.
Honorable Mention - A special shoutout for a hobbyist project called simply "Pinterest Bookmarklet" (although "Pinterest Audience" appears to be a contender) that uses Pinterest's source tracking and displays the data as a save-able .csv file. We imagine this could be of particular use for marketers gathering brand competitor intelligence and hope Aaron, Josh, and A.J.continue its development.
If you'd like to see this one in action, try running it on an often-pinned-from site like Pillsbury.com. If it is near lunchtime, maybe try running it from a clothing retailer site instead, as we went weak at the knees at the thought of the Caramel Brownie Bites, a Pillsbury 2012 Bake-off finalist. Yum!
Yummly, a semantic recipe search engine, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Physic Ventures and Unilever Corporate Ventures, the venture capital arm of food giant Unilever, with contributions from returning investors Harrison Metal Capital and the Harvard Commons Press, among others.
Yummly aggregates hundreds of thousands of recipes from around the web and allows you to filter results by type of food, course, and ingredient and break down recipes by diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, and sources.
You can also edit and save any recipe with ingredient substitutions and adjustments based on your preferences; Yummly will recalculate the recipe to reflect the new ingredient amounts. So if you wanted to cut a recipe down to one portion, Yummly will recalculate the ingredients you need for a smaller version of a dish.
And Yummly calculates the nutritional value for each recipe, showing you the breakdown of calories, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Users can also import and add their favorite recipes from other websites and save them in their Yummly recipe box.
The company says it is now seeing 4 million unique visitors a month, and also launched a Facebook app as well. Yummly has around 1.4 million Facebook subscribers and has seen a 75 percent uptick in Facebook referral traffic since launching the Timeline app last year. The new funding will be used for hiring and product development.
Learn moreJanuary 2009
$7.85M
Yummly is the fastest growing food site in the world. Our mission is simple, we want to organize the kitchen by creating the digital kitchen platform.
Through the hard-fought battle to represent the world’s brands, social marketing platform Wildfire has stayed quiet. But today, it revealed to TechCrunch that it has 13,000 paying customers, more than any company in the space, and has grown from 7 to 300 employees since the start of 2010, making it as big as industry giant Buddy Media. It’s now ranked in the top 1% on the Glass Door chart of best places to work, and we estimate its 2011 revenues were between $35 and $45 million.
While 13,000 customers sounds impressive, many of those are low-paying monthly campaign clients, not big SaaS deals like other platforms close. To shift more to its lucrative full social media marketing suite, Wildfire has just hired a new CMO Doug Laird, formerly of QlikTech, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle. [Update: I've just discovered that Wildfire secretly closed a $10 million Series B round late last year. The round came from existing investors, so it could have included Summit Partners, 500 Startups, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, or Gary Vaynerchuk. This is the first time this funding has been written about.]
Wildfire’s business is helping brands market through Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn. Founded in 2008, it focused on conducting Facebook contests and sweepstakes for years, but it’s now raised a total of $14 million and in 2011 launched a multi-function marketing suite with bigger profit potential.
2011 turned out to be a breakout year for Wildfire:
- It grew revenue by 300 percent in 2011 while reportedly keeping margins high
- International business grew 500% to become 24% of the company’s revenue
- 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands are now customers, though many only pay for campaigns
- Customers include Electronic Arts, Sony, Virgin Atlantic, Target, Amazon, and even Facebook which manages over 50 of its own promotional Pages with Wildfire
- It signed 300 new subscription clients in the last 6 months of 2011
- It’s powered 200,000 marketing campaigns to date
CEO Victoria Ransom says Wildfire’s strength is that it works for small to medium-sized businesses as well as big brands. “It’s not an agency model. We build tools that are really intuitive” she tells me. Ransom says Wildfire is also highly scalable, as customers can make changes to their marketing presences without calling an account manager like they have to with other platforms.
Wildfire labels itself “The World’s Largest Provider of Social Media Marketing Solutions” but that’s not entirely right. It’s tied with rival Buddy Media in employee count, and likely made slightly less in revenue during 2011. Buddy Media also has 900 subscription customers that pay for huge, year-long contracts.
Wildfire has built a substantial customer base but now needs to figure out how to monetize them better. It doesn’t own a Facebook ads platform — it partners with Adaptly instead, excluding it from scoring big margins on the huge Facebook ad campaigns brands buy. It also has to convince customers that it can do more than just contests, or it could be left to subsist on campaigns that bring in just $250 a pop and $5 a day.
There’s room for several big players in the social marketing space, and by not raising too much money, Wildfire keeps itself an acquisition target. The question now is whether to fight it out in the crowded space amongst Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, and others, or sell to an old world marketing company that missed the boat on social.
Learn moreJuly 2008
$14.1M
Wildfire is the global leader in social media marketing software, with over 13,000 paying customers worldwide, including 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands. Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite combines best-of-breed social promotion and advertising software, robust mobile and desktop page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics in one complete platform. Wildfire’s powerful and intuitive software allows creative marketers and non-technical managers alike to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience and measure social media performance....
If you ask a heap of different people, “What is Social Media?”.. they will all give you a different answer.
Here are 50 definitions,
- About.com – Media is an instrument on communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication
- Affilorama - Social media is content created and shared by individuals on the web using freely available websites that allow users to create and post their own images, video and text information and then share that with either the entire internet or just a select group of friends
- AG Communications Group – Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online
- Answers.com – The online forms of communicating to the masses, which include blogs, microblogs, social networking sites and podcasts
- BlackBox Social Media – Social media is any online media platform that provides content for users and also allows users to participate in the creation or development of the content in some way
- Briancee - Social Media is the sharing of user (human) created information and interacting on-line using Internet technology
- Brian Solis – Social Media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers
- Common Craft – Social media in plain English (video)
- CubixDev - Social Media is the new term for socialising online. It allows people to freely interact with each other online where-ever they are and whenever they want
- Daily Blog Tips - Social media are the various forms of user generated content and the collection of websites and applications that enables people to interact and share information online
- Duct Tape Marketing – Social media is the use of technology combined with social interaction to create or co-create value
- Fresh Networks – Social media is people having conversations online. These conversations can take a variety of forms; for example, blogs and comments or photo sharing
- Get a Social Boost – Digital word of mouth
- Harish Dabasia – Social media is people having conversations online
- Health is Social – Social Media is the meeting place between people and technology
- Hudson Horizons – Social Media is often used as another term for user-generated content
- iContact - An umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures
- Integrasco – Social media explained (video)
- Investopedia – Internet-based software and interfaces that allow individuals to interact with one another, exchanging details about their lives such as biographical data, professional information, personal photos and up-to-the-minute thought
- Just Ask Kim – Social media is any media form that displays itself to an open public and encourages interaction between the host and all observers
- Kyle David Group – Social media is the technological path of least resistance for two-way communication and distribution through a large audience who would otherwise be unconnected if it were not for the technological medium
- Luke Hayes – Social media is a group of Internet-based applications that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content. This content is then shared through social interaction
- Mahalo - Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content
- Marta Kagan -What is Social Media (presentation)
- Michelle Digital – Social media is life online
- One Zero One – Social Media, by definition, is the collection of strategies, practices and tools for communicating, creating, sharing and discussing news, information and other media online
- Online Schools – Social media is technically a means for social interaction through the web
- Optimize Your Web Presence – Social media are online venues, such as social networking sites, blogs and wikis that enable people to store and share information called content, such as text, pictures, video and links
- Orange Soda – Social media is about interacting with and sharing information with others online
- ProPR – Social media are online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author. To do this, they use social software that enables anyone without knowledge of coding, to post, comment on, share or mash up content and to form communities around shared interests
- Radian6 - Social media is game changing, not a closed system, not just another media, transparent, more than blogs, decentralized and real-time and measurable
- Rapid Learning Life – What is Social Media? In Simple English
- Relationship Economy – Social media is communications
- Scobleizer - Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way
- Search Engine Land – Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions
- SEO Zodiac – Social Media is simply people having conversations online
- Social Media Optimization Services – Social media is people meeting other people
- Social Media Vision – Simply refers to communication/publication platforms which are generated and sustained by the interpersonal interaction of individuals through the specific medium or tool
- Squidoo - Social media also includes social networks that insist on people to come together online that shares a common interest
- Tech ER – Media is an instrument of communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication
- Telezent - Social media explained visually (presentation)
- The Financial Brand – Social media isn’t about the media, it’s about being social
- The Social Election – Social media is people talking to people online
- Tjongolongo - Social Media is word of mouth on steroids
- Web1Marketing - Social Media consists of media that support and encourage social interaction among user
- Webgeekly - Social Media is generally any website or service that uses Web 2.0 techniques and concepts
- Webopedia – A term used to describe a variety of Web-based platforms, applications and technologies that enable people to socially interact with one another online
- Wikipedia - Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques
- WiseGeek - Social media mainly consists of user-generated Internet content
And finally here is my definition of social media,
The Social Media Guide – Social media is user generated content that is shared over the internet via technologies that promote engagement, sharing and collaboration
As you can see from above there is certainly a wide range of definitions.
I would love to know your definition of what social media is.. so please leave a comment below!
Enjoy!
Facebook is within touching distance of the 900 million mark, Twitter has 200 million and growing, LinkedIn is comfortably popular with over 135 million, and Pinterest is growing fast with 10.5 million. With staggering numbers of people logging into social media every day, if your business isn’t on social networking sites – you’re missing out.
In order to reach as many people as possible your business needs lots of fingers, in lots of pies (as it were). With so many social networking sites on the web, managing all your platforms is a tricky job for any online or social media marketer.
Remembering to post quality content regularly is near on impossible when you have so many other jobs to do. However, there are a number of automated social media tools that take the stress out of managing and monitoring all your social media platforms:
Tweetdeck vs Hootsuite
When it comes to a multiplatform social media dashboard, the two biggest players are Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.
If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop to manage all your social media platforms in one place, these are the automation tools for you.
The two dashboards are pretty similar in a number of ways:
- You can monitor multiple social media pages including: Twitter, Facebook Pages and Profiles, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace and WordPress
- You can post directly out of the interface
- Users can share the same post across all platforms
The differences between the two however, are much more interesting. For instance, Tweetdeck is a desktop application. Users have to download the dashboard to their computer, which is often not possible on a company PC.
Hootsuite on the other hand is completely online and can be accessed from anywhere. It is this that gives Hootsuite its next benefit over its competitor. Any scheduled tweets will be sent – whether you’re online or not. Tweetdeck will only post if the PC is on, Internet is running and dashboard is logged into.
Automating your tweets and Facebook posts through either of these dashboards is ideal for busy marketers. You can schedule posts in bulk for weeks or months in advance, freeing up your time to manage other jobs.
Crowdbooster
While Hootsuite offers an insights feature, if you’re looking for clear and comprehensive results look no further than Crowdbooster.This online programme will show you how many people your tweets and Facebook posts reached, as well as monitoring your follower growth, in a simple graph. You can also schedule tweets and Facebook posts from this interface, but you can’t monitor your home feeds.
Crowdbooster has three highly useful features for any social media marketer. Firstly, the website tells you the best times to post content on your social media platforms based on when your followers are most active. This is designed to help you get the most out of your posts.
Another key feature is your audience insights. This feature shows you the followers or fans that have Retweeted, shared and liked your content the most. A vital insight for all marketers, this allows you to thank the people that are lending a hand.
It also helps you identify your most ‘influential’ followers. These are the followers that have the biggest ‘reach’ i.e. those with the biggest online following. This information will help you target those followers, ask them for retweets and encourage them to follow you.
Finally, Crowdbooster will tell you if there are any mentions that you’ve not yet responded too. For large companies this is really helpful as it will enable you to manage your online reputation, engage with your clients and join in the conversations.
If This Then That (ifttt)
You don’t need to be widget whizz or a plug-in pro to automate the publication of blog posts, photographs or anything else to your social media pages. What it says on the tin, ifttt literally tells your social media pages “IF I post on my blog, THEN publish to Facebook” and so on.
There is nothing more time consuming than constantly posting new blog posts on all your social media platforms, messaging each and every new twitter follower and always uploading photos to each site individually.
You create unique ‘tasks’ based on the channels available such as Youtube, WordPress and Instagram. The website says there are over 300 list combinations. If This Then That checks for updates every 15 minutes and will automatically post them to your ‘THAT’ channel.
This is much easier than it sounds but it you’re a bit confused, ifttt has a number of ready-prepared ‘recipes’ for you use. These are tasks other users have created and you simply change the URLs and minor details so it works for you.
Your job as an online marketer is jam packed at the best of times, but by using just one of these automation tools you can save yourself a whole lot of time and effort. Once you’ve got to grips with the interface of your chosen tool, you’ll be able to focus your energies elsewhere; while still yielding results from social media.
Bird and Co Creative is a leading online marketing and web design company in Bromsgrove. Contact them today to see how implementing a social media strategy can boost your business.
Proof: Facebook brand Engagement higher than Twitter! - article content
Socialbakers compared the average Engagement Rates of the 10 biggest Facebook Brands with their engagement on Twitter in the last month. These two social networks represent two diametrically different ways of communication so it’s no surprise that they engage their fans differently.
Facebook Is An Exclusive Relationship
Facebook engages people in a conversation and a dialogue providing it´s fans with a feeling of exclusivity. They can access all the brand´s interesting content in pictures, albums, links, status updates and more. This network is great for companies that mainly want to build a relationship with their Fans and share emotions that they want their brand to convey.
Twitter Streams, Blogs And Promotes
Twitter on the other hand is limited by 140 characters but at the same time its content reaches more people (Facebook has some content dedicated only to Fans who click on the Like button)and can be posted more often. It´s great for brands that have the need for live streaming, blogging and promoting ideas.
Facebook Engages Fans Better than Twitter
Brands with Higher Engagement on Facebook
Starbucks Redbull":facebook.com/redbull, Converse, Playstation, iTunes and McDonald´s have reached a higher average Engagement Rate on Facebook. It will always be easier to engage people with visual content, with more text, creative ideas and more space for exchanging information and engaging in dialogues.
Brands with Higher Engagement on Twitter
Oreo cookies and Skittles have been more engaging on Twitter. Why? Oreo cookies are celebrating their 100th Bithday and they are asking their fans to share their Oreo moments and Oreo rituals on Twitter. They are asking for the same engagement on Facebook but perhaps Twitter is more spontaneous and fun for this kind of communication.
Both Skittles and Oreo decided to play with words. Skittles releases the most random tweets – they have to be thinking that the more absurd the better! They engage fans to join them in creating or completing funny riddles and to taste and follow the rainbow. Almost as if its mission was to brighten up everyone´s day and Twitter was the ideal place to share all the bright moments with their fans. What else can fit into 140 characters better than emotions and thoughts of the moment?
Identical Engagement on Facebook and Twitter
Coca-Cola and Pringles have achieved identical Engagement Rates on Facebook and Twitter. But they haven´t reached a high number so it´s questionable whether their social media strategy is ideal. Plus if they post the same content on Twitter and Facebook, it´s not good for the brand. As mentioned, these two social networks are different and ask for a different approach and content.
To learn whether your brand engages fans better on Facebook or Twitter, you can use our Analytics Pro and start with a 14-day trial with Socialbakers Engagement Analytics PRO!
PRO Analytics for your Facebook Pages
Infegy is the provider of Social Radar, the most intelligent and intuitive social media analytics platform available today
As the preeminent source for sentiment-driven web and social analytics, Infegy is the provider of Social Radar®, cloud-based software that empowers organizations, such as enterprises, advertising agencies, new media firms and government institutions, to transform seemingly complex and vast online discussions into strategic decisions that bring current marketplace perceptions, future reception and long-term growth into focus. So how is Social Radar different? The speed (under five seconds), the historical data we can tap into (up to five years back), and the flexible queries that eliminate traditional focus-groups that are unlike anything else in the industry.
Editor's note: A version of this article previously appeared at KISSmetrics.com.
Social media is everywhere. It's in our homes, places of worship, schools and, of course, our businesses. Everywhere you look, people are using social media and are talking about it. And it seems that every week a new type of social site pops up.
And as the number of social networking sites grows, so does the number of services that are created to measure, track and monitor those services. What's a marketing professional to do?
To help you cut through the clutter, here are the 10 must-use social media tools that can not only help you make sense of your social media efforts but make them more effective.
1. EditFlow
EditFlow is a plugin from open source content management system WordPress that allows you to manage your editorial team seamlessly.With it, you can get a snapshot of your month-to-month content with the calendar feature. It also offers improved content status beyond WordPress' default draft and pending review. And user groups can help you keep your team of writers organized by department or function.
Who should use it and why: Any business owner who manages a multi-author website should give EditFlow a look. This tool can keep all of the things that are important to a multi-author blog in one spot so management is easy, clean and documented.
2. TweetReach
This tool allows you to see how far your tweets travel. For example, with TweetReach I can search my blog and come up with these results. It breaks down how many people your messages reach and how many tweets it took to reach them. For instance, TweetReach can tell you how many times your tweets have been shared by retweets, replies and other standard tweets.Who should use it and why: From a social media manager to a small-business owner, basically anybody who is interested in finding out how effective his or her tweets are based upon the number of people they touch should consider using TweetReach. It can also useful from a metric standpoint in terms of justifying the results of your social media campaigns with senior management or partners.
3. ArgyleSocial
This Durham, N.C.-based startup is a social media platform that aims to help marketers connect the business dots with the social media dots. ArgyleSocial offers a single dashboard to monitor Facebook and Twitter that allows you to delegate tasks to your team. It also offers easy reporting on the ROI of your social media efforts.If you'd like to be an affiliate, you can use ArgyleSocial's white label brand and resell the social media platform to your clients. All of your accounts can be wrapped up into one bill and sent to you to distribute or absorb as an included service.
Who should use it and why: From the social media manager to the one-person business that needs to prove to management, clients or themselves that their social media campaign is paying off.
4. HootSuite for iPad
HootSuite users should be happy with this iPad application. It includes a stationary column in the sidebar that keeps track of all streams being tracked.Among the other things HootSuite says you can do with this iPad app include checking in using a Foursquare account, scheduling messages to send at a later time, examine click-through statistics, add geo-location coordinates to messages and shorten URLs with a built-in Ow.ly tool.
Who should use it and why: HootSuite for iPad is for heavy iPad users who want to manage their social media content and engagement.
5. TweetLevel
You might be thinking you don't need another Tweet metric tool, but TweetLevel, allows you to specifically search for hashtags, which can lead you to insights on who to follow based upon conversation versus person.Once you've found someone you'd like to follow, you can use TweetLevel to help measure his or her social influence. You can also evaluate the buzz around a certain topic to determine if it's a trend worth paying attention to. Then take a peek at related phrases around your topic to gauge the true scope of the trending idea.
Who should use it and why: Public relations managers and social media marketing professionals who want to analyze a campaign should give TweetLevel a try. This tool can help you identify the Twitter conversation, where it's going wrong and how to correct that mistake.
6. ReFollow
When it comes to Twitter, numbers might not be as important as the people you follow and who follows you. ReFollow is an application that allows you to lock in those followers that you've connected with and make sure they continue to follow you.Other features include filtering a search on Twitter to uncover insights, such as what you have in common with certain followers. This can lead you to connecting with someone who maybe you're Twitter conversation has been close to zero, but with a simple direct message to that person you can make a connection and build a business relationship.
Who should use it and why: This can be the perfect tool for the person who wants to grow a list of highly-qualified, like-minded people. Consider using ReFollow if your concern is quality over quantity, which it should be.
7. TwitterSearch
You've probably heard of TwitterSearch but, more than likely, you aren't using it correctly.New media expert Thomas Baekdal offers a number of little-known tips for using TwitterSearch. For instance, to see what people are saying about your competitors, search with to:competitor or from:competitor. Replace "Competitor" with that company's Twitter handle.
To uncover top trending topics search that topic plus –rt filter:links. For example, "digital marketing-rt filter:links". That code will remove all of the retweets from the search.
Who should use it and why: Anyone who wants to use and search Twitter more effectively should brush up on his or her TwitterSearch skills. And knowing what's trending on Twitter can be a useful way to generate ideas for your business blog. When you see trending topics, you can create a blog post with content relevant to that discussion.
8. Traackr
One simple way to find and follow people who are influential in your space is to use Traackr. It allows you to identify the "authorities" in your industry who can mean the most to your business or your client's.What's also useful about Traackr is that you can watch how social media leaders are responding and contributing to content you are sharing. An ad agency, for example, can see who it should target to help social media campaigns get off the ground, build its engagement strategies based upon Traackr's unique intelligence and then see results of those campaigns.
Who should use it and why: Traackr can be a useful tool for either advertising agencies or brands that want to build social media campaigns that improve over time and show how they pay off in the end.
9. SocMetrics
The Topical Influencer platform by SocMetrics is a web-based tool that allows you to identify influencers, understand who these people are, interact with them and then monitor your campaign.The "Competitive Influence" feature allows you to specify brands and drill down for detailed influencers. What's slick about this tool is that you can narrow your search to a long-tail keyword, seeing who is truly influential.
Who should use it and why: Any marketing professional who wants to build an effective social media campaign based upon influencers in a specific industry should give this a look. SocMetrics can help you harness the power of thought leaders, which in turn can help you build your brand and sell more.
10. Social Scope
For BlackBerry users who've longed for an app that combines Twitter and Facebook on one screen, such as TweetDeck for your desktop, consider trying Social Scope.And on that same screen you'll see a thumbnail image if someone shares something from TwitPic. It also has a built in retweeting feature, hash tag search and will also let you see the entire URL to know where a truncated URL is pointing.
Who should use it and why: Anyone who owns a BlackBerry and has a Facebook and Twitter account is a prime target for this app. It's probably the closest you can get to a desktop-type app on a BlackBerry.
Interested in discovering the top influencers within all of your online communities?
Meet Kred. The only transparent social scoring system that filters messages, sorts by community and measures your influence and outreach in real time.
“We all have influence somewhere”.
CEO name: Jodee Rich
Startup company: Kred
Location: San Francisco
Financial backers: Self-fundedDescribe your startup’s product.
Kred is a measure of Influence and Outreach in communities connected by interests and affiliations.Can you expand on that?
Based on our database of 1,000 days of social data, we find the most influential and generous people talking about any subject.How can people increase their social score?
Interactions are the most important part of Kred. You earn Influence and Outreach Points when you engage with others and they engage with you. Influence often comes from real world achievements, so we also let people add points for their offline accomplishments.
Who are your potential customers?
Little Brothers and Big Brothers who want to consume the collective intelligence.How’s business going for you?
We were lucky to start our business in 2007 at the beginning of the social media revolution. Business is going well. We expect to do about $4 million in revenue this year.Describe your work environment in three words.
Attention to detail.What do you look for in a business partner?
Open, Can see the trees and the forest, Prepared to be differentWhat keeps you up at night?
Dreaming about fuzzy unstructured data about people.What wakes you up before your alarm?
Sloppy people
Describe your typical day at the office?
No meetings, sitting with individual team members, afternoon nap.How do you pump yourself up before a big meeting?
Meditate on humility.Which company in your industry do you most admire?
Twitter. Its big open data is completely changing how information moves around the world and from person to person. Millions of Little Brothers are now competing on equal footing with Big Brother.What will the WSJ to say about your company 5 years from now?
They were ahead of their time.What life experiences prepared you to be an entrepreneur?
Cleaning fish tanks, writing code on punch cards, my mum was a spiritual guru, and my dad was a German-American capitalist.What keeps you excited and engaged when you’re not at work?
My wife, my three children, kitesurfing and bump skiing.How do you keep up with what’s going on in the start up world?
I hang out with other San Francisco force field nerds.What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned so far?
Detail, detail, detail.What do you consider your most important achievement so far?
Proposing to my wife.What do you consider your most important professional achievement so far?
Writing Applesoft code in 1980 for a 64k Apple II and launching Kred in 2011.
Salary aside, how else do you incentivize your employees?
Passion, listening, and building together.Do you have mentors you get advice from? If so, who?
Some of them are Porter Gale, Jeffrey Hayzlett, Tim O’Reilly and Brian Solis.What do you do to take a break or let off steam?
I bicycle to work every day. Chin ups. Spaghetti Arabiata.What are you most thankful for?
Being a human on Planet Earth in 2012 at the beginning of the social media revolution.What’s your idea of perfect happiness?
Nine hours of sleep.What else do you do to prepare for a big meeting?
Dream about it.What are the biggest challenges you face as an entrepreneur?
Being in three places at once.How big is too big when it comes to growing your business?
Too big is when team members have forgotten why they come to work each day.What’s the best advice you ever received?
Life is a roller coaster.Anything else you want to say?
Great questions.
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By Michelle Hill, Published January 29, 2012
Content marketing, due to its subtle and nurturing nature, might sometimes be mistaken for a ‘fluffy’ marketing technique which doesn’t drive measurable results to your business. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Yes, content marketing educates, nurtures, influences and engages and it is those features which make it such an effective marketing tool in a buying environment where people no longer want to be sold to. However, let us not lose sight of exactly how powerful that tool is when it comes to hard numbers and proven results.
According to Marketo, companies that nurture leads enjoy:
- 150% increase in contact-to-lead conversion rate
- 2-3 x lift in conversion rates on raw leads to qualified opportunities
- 20% more sales opportunities
- 225% increase in volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities
- 47% higher average order values
- Fewer marketing-generated leads ignored by sales (from 80% to as low as 25%)
Let’s take a look at blogging
According to Inblurbs, studies show that 57% of companies that write a corporate blog obtain new customers through it. They also enjoy:
- Up to 55% more traffic
- Up to 97% more inbound links
- Up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
- Up to 25 times more business leads
What about email marketing?
A recent Hubspot survey revealed that lead nurturing emails have a much higher click through rate than more general emails:
- Lead nurturing emails generated an 8% CTR
- General emails generated a 3% CTR
I also read a case study by Marketing Sherpa about a company called PostcardMania whose lead nurturing activities (a large part of which was an automated email marketing campaign) yielded the following results:
- 70% increase in sales calls
- An increase in the number of Web form-generated leads from 67.7% to 77.6%
How does social media marketing fair?
According to the CMI 2011 digital marketing study, 68% of marketers surveyed said they have generated leads from social media sites and more than 55% of them have closed deals from social media leads.
A quick look at news content marketing
We need look no further than some of our own clients to see the significant impact news content marketing can have on your website traffic:
- 3,600 visits into SellCar-UK.com website from one news story
- 100% increase in visitors into Randstad site through news articles
- 54% of Red Rocket Media web traffic through news articles
I could go on…
OK I should probably stop firing statistics at you now but I hope I’ve been able to prove the point I was trying to make. To most businesses, it’s the numbers that matter and anyone that tells you that content marketing won’t bring you these numbers, in my opinion, hasn’t been doing it properly.
What about you? Let us know your ‘number’ successes below.
New tool helps you find your most popular tweets
Twitter itself may not have an awful lot to offer in the way of analytics, but that doesn’t stop new apps and sites coming up with innovative ways to help you measure the success of your Twitter account.
Enter TwitSprout. Despite the pretty awful name, the service offered is actually going to be very useful, particularly for brands who want to monitor their Twitter success over time. My Top Tweet by TwitSprout allows you to enter a username to find the top tweets associated with that account, by the number of retweets. Obviously that’s only one metric by which to measure success, as number of clicks is also important, but this is a valuable way of seeing which tweets worked the best for you:
The useful thing about this site is that you’re also not restricted to just finding your own top tweets. When you’ve signed in through Twitter you can search for any username (hint – handy if you want to keep an eye on your competitors).
This isn’t the only Twitter analytics tool offered by TwitSprout, as they’ve recently released their full analytics package (separate to My Top Tweets) for both Twitter and Facebook Pages. For brands you can choose to pay for access, giving you more features including competitor analysis, but individual users can get limited analytics for three accounts for free. Snapshots include an hour by hour breakdown of when you gain your most followers, showing you when your Twitter community is at its most active:
Check it out – you can sign up for a free trial without having to enter any credit card details.
Sysomos MAP - Media Analysis PlatformMAP is Sysomos' flagship product, offering customers the ability to effectively listen, measure, understand and engage. MAP delivers insight into the key conversations, why they're happening and who's driving them.
- Unlimited queries and access to billions of conversations
- Identify key influencers by industry or demographic groups
- Understand key conversations, themes and trends
- Conduct in-depth research, prepare detailed reports
Why MAP?
Comprehensive and Spam-Free Database
A database, featuring billions of social media conversations dating back two years. Fresh content is constantly added by actively indexing blogs, social networks, Twitter, YouTube, wikis, message boards, video sharing sites, and news sources.Key Influencer Identification
Quickly identify the people leading conversations and shaping opinion, and then engage with them to build relationships.Detailed Geographic and Demographic Data
Access information about social media participants and the conversations they're having, including their age, gender and profession.Automated Sentiment
Discover whether the relevant and important conversations are positive, negative or neutral.Measurable Metrics
Access information about how much activity is happening, where it's coming from and who's talking, and the authority of those involved.Understand Topics and Themes
Get a handle on the development, news, products and brands attracting the most conversations.Competitive Analysis
Quickly compare reach, share of voice and brand impact against competitors, as well as different topics and brands.
The costs of advertising on Facebook are rising, but marketers who keep their traffic within the social network’s environment are seeing their costs per click drop by as much as 45 percent, according to fourth-quarter research from TBG Digital.
The advertising technology firm found that the average cost per click in the U.S. rose 10 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter. Meanwhile, Canada, France, and Germany saw minimal increases in average cost per click, and it actually fell 11 percent in the U. K.
Facebook’s growth rate has been plateauing in the U.S., which contributed to the cost-per-click increase. TBG Founder and Chief Executive Officer Simon Mansell explained further:
One of the big reason for the price increases in the U.S. market is that advertisers are still willing to buy on Facebook, but there’s not the supply that there was. They’re making more money per click. As markets mature, people will have to pay more to get delivery, as long as Facebook still has demand from advertisers.
As for the decline in the United Kingdom, Mansell mentioned that click-through rates increased in that country, but the addition of sponsored stories there took longer.
However, those advertisers who were able to construct campaigns that kept users within the Facebook environment, rather than sending them to outside websites, paid as much as 45 percent less per click.
Mansell said Facebook was rewarding people who kept traffic within its environment with hefty discounts, as it was still creating impressions within the social network, and monetizing that traffic.
Brands in the finance industry found it difficult to take advantage of that loophole, as they tend to migrate users to their websites for reasons of security and privacy. TBG said 61 percent of campaigns by companies in the finance industry drove users off Facebook, resulting in costs per click that are double the overall average.
Overall click-through rates rose 18 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the first quarter. At opposite ends of the spectrum, France saw click-through rates double, while they actually fell 2 percent in the United States.
Over the same time period, Facebook’s rates for cost per thousand impressions jumped 23 percent, including 8 percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. TBG added that this figure has gone up every quarter for the social network, and Mansell added, “Money per impression will be a really important number for Facebook’s initial public offering.”
The holiday season caused cost per click to skyrocket by 55.7 percent from November 21 through December17, which Mansell attributed to advertisers trying to implement last-minute promotions and take advantage of spikes in online shopping, adding that the surge in retail advertising during that period led to more demand, and, thus, higher costs.
The food and drink category took over first place on the list of industries analyzed by TBG, bumping beauty and fitness out of the top spot. Mansell mentioned strong campaigns by TBG clients including Heineken, Jack Daniel’s, and Captain Morgan, and also speculated that the increase may have had something to do with the times of day when Facebook users were accessing the social network.
Finally, we asked Mansell about the impact of Facebook’s transition to the Open Graph and enabling of action items besides the like, and he said:
We haven’t seen any major difference from the new Open Graph because a lot of different brands haven’t gotten their heads around it, to be honest. It’s confusing to some clients — they’re going from one action, like, to infinite numbers of actions. We have started to see a difference with Facebook putting ads in the news feed, however.
TBG analyzed more than 326 billion impressions from 266 clients in 205 countries.
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