Websites analytics are well known, and every marketing blog seems to devote a few posts to Google Analytics, Piwik, Clicky and others.
However, data from your social channels is not less important than what comes from your website — in fact, the analysis social interactions and traffic is vital for a good marketing strategy because it indicates the interaction patterns of your audience on the channel, what they are interested in and what you could work on to increment it.
As precious as this data is, I selected 4 social analytics tools (that I personally tested) for this post that will help you get the most out of your channels with no extra effort.
1. Followerwonk (Twitter)
URL: https://moz.com/followerwonk/
In its free version, this tool by MOZ allows you to search for Twitter users and find influencers, followers, and other helpful statistics. In other words, you can do 2 things for free:
- Analyze users a Twitter profile follows
- Analyze the followers of that profile
The good news is that you can do that also with our own account! The screenshot below shows the report I obtained when I looked up my own Twitter profile:
Followerwonk shows me some profile stats and my Social Authority (39 in my case), then it gives me a world map with the location of my followers, so I have an overview of their geolocation and I can decide if I want to use this information to create culturally diverse content.
I’m also given an overview of the times of the day my followers are mostly active, so I can know when to publish content for better visibility (6 PM for me).
Other data in the report include: keyword/word cloud of my followers’ interests (for example: marketing, blogger, social media), locations per keyword (example: US, UK, India, Italy, China), age and gender demographics, and distribution of social authority among your followers. All this data can help better targeting your marketing efforts.
The other tool is the Twitter profile and bio search. If I search for profiles talking about “digital marketing”, I get a list — ordered by followers and social authority — of users with similar interests. This is a good tool to use when you want to find influencers and professional contacts. Here is an example:
My advice is to start with high social authority but approachable users rather than VIPs, unless you can touch upon topics you know they’re really interested about and you have something to offer that they don’t already know.
You can look up max 50 profiles a day and up to 100 keyword searches a day.
2. SimplyMeasured
URL: http://simplymeasured.com/free-social-media-tools/
SimplyMeasured offers a range of free social media analytics tools about all major social networks — Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ — plus tools that connect to Google Analytics to find out how social media impact your website performance.
Here is an example report for my character blog EileenSON.org — I used the Google Analytics tool provided by SimplyMeasured to analyze the social impact of this blog:
If you choose the Facebook page analysis tool, you will get a report of the engagement and performance of your page for the last two weeks, how your content is faring and how engaged your audience is. The tool works with pages up to 150,000 likes.
All these tools are available after signing up for a free SimplyMeasured report and send a pay-with-a-tweet app tweet in lieu of payment.
3. Cyfe
URL: http://www.cyfe.com/
The tool has a simple dashboard with settings, users, and widgets — which are the core of the tool: there’s a widget for each social network you want to monitor.
Register a free account, go to your dashboard and click on Add Widget (the 4-squares icon on the top bar, next to the dashboard’s name, “Dashboard di Luana Spinetti” in my example below) and add the ones you want. In this example, I added widgets for my Facebook page and Twitter account:
There are various widget categories you can choose from, not just social media: blogging and advertising are also included.
This is a very good tool for multiple account management, all free, so definitely a must-have among your analytics suites.
4. Klout
URL: https://klout.com/
I already wrote about Klout and how to use it to generate blog post ideas, but here I want to focus on its analytics features.
Under the Measure tab, Klout lets you have an overview of your performance across the major social networks and it gives you a score based on engagement, frequency of posting and an analysis of topics by in-content keywords or tags. On the sidebar, Klout also shows you a graph of your contributions per social network — that is, where you are mostly active overall.
Also under the Measure tab is the list of Expert Topics, ordered by rank, that you can use to target most of your marketing efforts and that you can offer more often on your blog and social channels.
The Explore tab gives you an insight into what content is relevant to your channel and it also gives suggestions on what experts you could get in touch. It’s a good idea to take the suggested content under this tab in consideration, because Klout calculated how much interest your audience may have in these topics. See the Disney Channel title in the example below, and Klout’s On Target label for it:
Klout definitely provides plenty of data and suggestions to use for marketing and the development of your website.
Other Tools
Google Analytics is still your friend, whether you run it from SimplyMeasured or from your GA Dashboard. It’s all free and data is known to be reliable, so it’s good to exploit this tool.
Also, make use of social networks’ own analytics, like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and Pinterest Analytics. These suites come free to all platform users, and sometimes they also make their API available to create customized widgets for your website.
Which tools do you use for social analytics? Let us know in comments.
About Luana Spinetti
