3 FREE Social Media Measurement Tools
Free social media measurement tools are always a hot commodity for marketers.
If you’re like a lot of social media marketers, then you are often faced with significant hurdles when it comes to both measuring your results and receiving any sort of significant budget to make it easier. Luckily, there are options that exist to make your life much easier!
While there is a whole host of tools that exist on the paid side of the spectrum (some very affordable and others quite the opposite) it is always useful to start your endeavor into the world of social media measurement with some free tools. These are a few that can be particularly useful and provide quite a bit of insight.
Google Analytics
It might seem like Google Analytics does little more than track website traffic, but when you are using it properly, it can be one of your most valuable resources for measuring the success (and even revenue) of your social media strategy.
Between the social dashboard (under Acquisition) and the ability to set Goals and Filters from social networks, there is no shortage of what can be measured on Google Analytics. Use the system to better understand your social audience, identify which pieces of content are driving the most engagement (segmented by network) and even see which networks are driving the most revenue (either through direct sales or some sort of quantifiable action) in order to optimize your budget allocation.
Google Analytics does a whole lot more than simply track your visitors.
Simply Measured
Granted, there is a paid version of Simply Measured and it is certainly not the least expensive option on the market. But, the free reports offered by the service are amongst the most comprehensive and valuable of any free service on the web.
Perhaps one of the benefits of these free reports is the fact that they are not limited to only the most basic of networks. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, you can also generate reports for networks like Instagram, Vine, Google+ and even link to your Google Analytics reports and better understand your audience.
If ever there was a way to entice users to upgrade to a paid version, Simply Measured has figured it out by offering such detailed free reports that you almost need to see what more they could provide.
Social Mention
Though not a brand-specific analytics tool for social media, per se, Social Mention does provide detailed analytics around keywords (branded or otherwise) that can serve as valuable guidelines on creating content and participating in the social conversation.
Understanding what is being said about your brand, your competitors and your industry as a whole, and examining the audience discussing these topics is important to the practice of strategy optimization. As a free tool, Social Mention is one of the more valuable ones and one of the easiest to use. Simply jump in and start analyzing the conversation, then take the data you’ve pulled and apply what you have learned about content, trends and the audience to your strategies.
It should be noted that there are several niche tools that focus specifically on one network. For example, there is Tailwind for Pinterest, which offers a fairly extensive free trial, and Iconosquare for Instagram, but the three listed here will help you measure your social presence in its entirety as opposed to a network-by-network basis.
Are there any other tools – free or paid – that you like using? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!
What free Social Media Measurement Tools would you recommend for organisations looking to measure their social media activity in the graduate recruitment arena?
Or indeed paid-for?