You may already be blogging, tweeting and facebook-ing
. But how much of an effect are you having? One way you can track this is to simply keep tabs on your bottom line and correlate that with changes in your social media strategy. If you are simply looking for the effect you are having on the industry in general, discussions that are happing about your brand or what you customers think there are some very useful tools that you can use. There are several tools I use to track my social media presence. My top 3 are:
Google Blog Search
I love using Google search to find out what's going on with my brand in the social media world but there is a more specific way to do this. Google blogsearch allows me to type in my keywords, name, company's name, etc and the search returns results based on blog postings. I like this tool because I can easily find mentions of me and track which of my blog posts are being syndicated on other blogs.
Klout
This tool is great to track where I am on the Twitter spectrum. I can get a detailed explanation of my Klout score and it is easy to monitor my score updates. This tool is based on Twitter so it only measures your social reach on Twitter but it is still an excellent indicator of your true influence, or lack thereof.
Twitter Search
I can use the Twitter search function to find tweets about myself, my brand and my products or services. This can also be helpful to find out who is tweeting about your content. I like to network with those who are already tweeting about my brand. It is a great way to continue a conversation with them as well as hopefully making a brand advocate out of them. For more information on brand advocates please see our article on the blog titled Brand Advocates and You.
These are only a few metrics I use to track my social media standing. It is important to use tools that are particularly useful to your brand. I find that the three listed above are generally helpful for any brand but there are many more that could be added to the list. If you haven't used one of these tools previously, try it out. Let us know what you think. Do you have another excellent tool that you would like to tell us about? Please do!