What Three Social Media Tools Can’t You Live Without?

Ah analytics, I love them. I take all numbers with a grain of salt but it is nice to see if your efforts are paying off and what things people share or inspire a click. For example, a recent popular tweet, based on number of clicks, was a tweet about Klout with 177 clicks – clearly my followers are interested in Klout. Some tools allow you to see who has unfollowed you and who your new followers are or even help you find new people to follow. I also find it nice to know who my biggest retweeters or mentioners were for the week and acknowledge them. I am glad I picked this question, because I have some seriously smart friends answering and they had a few surprises for me.

My three favorite analytics tools are:

1. Social Bro – This has a site has graphs, pie charts and numbers – everything a geek girl like me loves! I like to check unfollows, best time to tweet and it is a great place to find new followers. You can search for followers by location or bio as well as other filters such as number of followers or tweets per day.

2. Social Mention – Fun information here such as how many people have mentioned you and the frequency that you are mentioned along with top key words, sentiment (positive, neutral and negative) and number of retweets. For me, analyzing my own tweet style and topics helps me be consistent and stay on target for my brand. You can look for mentions on blogs, comments, images and more.

3. Bit.ly – This is a link shortening tool that also has information on conversions, traffic and history. There is a handy tool bar and it works with Tweetdeck and Seesmic.

Thoughts from Miles Austin (@milesaustin)

One of the fastest growing categories in web tools, Social Media Analytics has new applications being added weekly. Three of my current favorites for small business, individuals and heavy duty marketers are:

1. Sprout Social helps manage multiple social networks from one place. Prices start at $9.99/month. Great for small businesses.

2. Gist integrates all of your contacts into one dashboard, pulling news and updates from across the social platforms, while integrating with your core communication platforms like Outlook or Gmail. Free at this time. Great for the individual user.

3. Involver is rumored to be used by Facebook’s internal marketing team and consists of tools to review RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and more. Multiple levels beginning at Free through $2,800/month. Recommended for the heavy duty marketer.

Thoughts from Jure Klepic (@jkcallas):

The 3 Analytics tools that I really would be lost without are:

1. @peoplebrowsr Playground application is real time data analytic tools which helps you improve and identify the influence in your community and around the web. Great analytic tool that will help any brand increase their market share.

2. @hashtracking Once you understand the power of a hashtag, hashtracking is incredible tool to help you analyzing and discover the performance of your branded hashtags. I really like to discover who are participants, top users of particular hashtag, impressions made and what was the user reach, during the chat or for particular community / topic.

3. @bufferapp Bufferapp has a built-in analytic tool which help discovering how many users press on link and how many users RT you tweet. You are as able to identify which content your users like and which topics are most popular in your hub.

Thoughts from Michelle Kay: (@thedomesticexec)

Here are my three SM analytics besides the obvious Google Analytics:

1. BO.LT is my very favorite because it has great sharing options and the service keeps track of the clicks you get. I am still surprised by the number of views I get to my blog from my BO.LT‘ed pages. Here's a great explanation from the Bo.LT blog: When you create a BO.LT, the analytics tags on the original page still function on the copied BO.LT — and in fact may get a little better.It is easy to see the benefits to me as a blogger from BO.LTing pages: In a way it is a better bit.ly, one that lets me create a branded, shareable link for Twitter, Facebook and wherever I share. But it is nice to know that the original content creator is not going to be penalized. The other day I was talking to a blogger friend about using BO.LT to share content, and he asked about tracking. He was concerned that, because BO.LT was creating a copy of a webpage to a cloud server, the original content creator would lose their ability to collect metrics and site traffic. It occurred to me that if this was on one blogger’s mind, it might be on some others as well. So, we thought it prudent to reassure you all:BO.LT leaves your metrics intact!When a page is copied to the BO.LT network, it’s parsed intelligently to move referenced files and images over to our servers while keeping outbound links. We also have an automated system for recognizing and preserving the integrity of tracking and targeting pixels. If you had a working analytics tag on a page we copy, our copy will continue to accurately record visits back to your original analytics account. The original content creator will still see the visitors who view the BO.LTed copy of the page and will get credit for those visits.

Here's the link to the BO.LT blog: http://blog.bo.lt/post/10810095790/bo-lt-for-better-analytics

2. MarketMeSuite I had drooled over this one for a long time. I love it. In fact I'm addicted. It’s so much better than any other social dashboard! They describe themselves as the social dashboard on steroids! And that it is! And it’s now free for everyone!!

3. Crowdbooster Lets me know how, I'm doing overall, when's the best time to reach my followers and who recently mentioned me or followed me. Great for getting to know my new friends.

What analytic tools do you have in your belt? Please share! 

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Feature photo courtesy of Creative Commons

Resources:
From Ben Parr: How to Measure and Track Social Media Analytics
Article by Peg Fitzpatrick