This is a guest post by Corina Mackay. She is a freelance writer, social media manager and inbound marketer. Hit her up on Twitter or Google+. More information about guest posts.
If you’re plugged into social media, you’ve probably realized how difficult it can be to monitor your various accounts and the activity happening around them.
These five monitoring tools offer different benefits and restrictions, but using a mixture, you should be able to get the stats you need for a killer social media strategy.
TWEETSTATS
For a simple way to view stats around your Twitter account, Tweetstats is a good tool. This free service doesn’t require an account, or even authorization to access your Twitter account. Simply type in your Twitter handle and watch the magic.
Using colourful charts, Tweetstats can show you the number of tweets you’ve sent, who you retweet and reply to the most, which apps you use most often and which times you tweet more. You can also see charts of your following/follower counts and which words and hashtags you use most often.
TWENTYFEET
For event managers with a widely-spread social presence, Twentyfeet offers analytics for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, bit.ly and Google Analytics.
The stats available include replies, retweets and follower numbers for Twitter. Facebook stats are also available, offering insight into your fans by location, age and gender, as well as fan and comment numbers for your fan page.
Free Twentyfeet accounts only track one Twitter and one Facebook account, but you can trial the paid service for 30 days before paying to add more accounts.
CROWDBOOSTER
If you’re looking for a monitoring tool that offers more interaction with your account, Crowdbooster might be the way to go.
Crowdbooster’s free plan offers one Twitter and one Facebook account, as well as an option to connect your bit.ly account. You can see the number of replies, retweets and impressions for each of your posts and compare them on a chart, as well as monitoring follower growth for your accounts.
Crowdbooster sets itself apart from other apps with a couple of extra features: you’ll get suggested times to post based on when your followers are more engaged. Secondly, Crowdbooster has a nifty way of picking up which of your followers are influential and nudging you to follow back or reach out to them.
You can also upgrade to a paid account to add more accounts.
CONVERSOCIAL
If you’re more interested in monitoring what people are saying about your events, Conversocial may be worth a try.
This app works like an inbox, monitoring activity to highlight important messages and sentiment from your audience. Only Twitter and Facebook analysis are available, but for most event managers, these are probably the platforms you use to converse with your customers the most.
Using filters and triggers that you set, the app will highlight any messages or comments which seem important. You can then respond, archive or delete these messages from within the app. If you want to add more team members, you can upgrade to a premium account.
Reports are also available, showing positive and negative sentiment among your audience, your response speed and the number of messages or comments your accounts are receiving.
BUFFER
Although Buffer is primarily a scheduling app for social media accounts, it has analytics built-in to help you examine the effectiveness of different posts.
A free Buffer account will let you add one account each from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and measures replies, retweets, impressions and favorites for each post you send through the app. We use this one regularly at Attendly, as it offers an easy way to integrate analytics into our social sharing process.
With a paid upgrade you can add multiple accounts and have more posts in your Buffer queue, waiting to be sent. You can also add a second team member to manage your account after upgrading.
