In my previous post, I described Buzz Logic, an agency that can help you measure your social media. If that agency does not suit your needs, there are many free measurement sites that might help.
MeasurementCamp is a wiki that is dedicated to providing resources for any company interested in measuring their communication in social media sources. They have divided up their list of tools into sections based on what you want to measure (your return on investment).
If you want to measure how visible your brand is to other people on the internet, there are a few sites you can use. HowSociable? is a tool to help you determine that. On this website, there is a search bar where you can type in your brand’s name and then click the button that says, ‘Measure Visibility.’ From here, a number of boxes will come up and give your brand a score in 22 different metric areas. These include Google, Facebook, and Twitter searches. These scores are generated from the number of posts, pages, photos, etc. that have mentioned your brand name.
If you want to search the blogosphere, Technorati is one site that is able to help with that. You can search for top blogs based on links, posts, or tags. This can allow you to see the most talked about topics and allow you to search for what people are saying about your company.
If you want to keep track of the buzz floating around the web, Trendpedia is a useful site. This site tracks finds trends in social media and keeps track of who is discussing what, when, where and how. You can set up Trendpedia to track posts and articles about your topic every day or just on a specific day. This helps you stay informed about what is being said about your company or idea.
Other categories for measuring social media that MeasurementCamp includes are message board and Twitter searches, measuring website traffic, and searching data. Also, you could search through multimedia sites, such as YouTube and Flickr.
There are many ways to measure your use of social media and it all depends on what you determine your return on investment to be. It could be qualitative or quantitative, but you need to be able to measure so you can know whether your actions are successful or not.
