CDPR108 - Week 10 - Social Media Measurement

I am now 5 months into my PR career and I am fully engulfed in our social media plan. Now that we have everything getting off the ground we are really looking at measuring the success of this social media plan and are using Facebook Insights and Google Analytics. I didn't realize there were so many free (and paid) measurement tools available other than these two options! I guess I just never really looked. I have heard of Radian6 before and had read through some of their articles and such while in my previous job.

One tool I have started using, mostly for convenience-sake, is TweetDeck. This monitoring tool has been very helpful to me because our store operates as a skating store and now a dance store, so we actually have a skating Twitter and a dance Twitter. TweetDeck has been very easy to operate and very helpful when I am the only person managing these two accounts. First of all, I don't have to sign in and out of 2 different Twitter accounts (3 if I include my own personal account); second of all I can monitor and browse through the feeds of all accounts at the same time. With TweetDeck you can also use scheduled tweets which may be useful for certain organizations or for certain information that you need to tweet at a certain time - although I have read many articles about these scheduled tweets that suggest you don't use them as you lose authenticity.

Minilytics by PageLever is something I just came across while doing this assignment. PageLever can provide you with detailed analytics for your Facebook page, but Minilytics is the free version and tells you things like: when the best time to post is; what times of posts generate the most engagement and more!

PageLever can do a lot for you depending on what you are looking for (and what you are willing to pay!). You could get analytics and other reports regarding your Facebook page and Twitter account, or you could get something more in-depth which would use these analyses to create posts and publish tweets.

Brandify is another free tool I have come across which I am going to suggest to my boss and see if we can try it out! This tool, as it states on their website, works as a report card and quickly gives you a feel of your presence online. It provides you a score, like a credit score, and then provides recommendations on how to improve your score - in turn really improve your online presence. With this tool, I kept looking on their website for the paid version... but it really is a FREE tool!

One free tool that I have found quite intriguing and slightly different is SiteTrail (www.sitetrail.com). This one is particularly interesting because you can not only analyze your own website, but you can analyse other websites as well. What does this mean for you? You can see how your top competitors stack up! You can see how many people are visiting the site, the top keywords, the top links to that site, and more!

With these four options, I think a company or organization has the opportunity to understand their own web presence, help promote it, and understand the competitors. Each of these tools could be used differently depending on the company or organization using them, but I think they could each be used no matter what!

I work for a retail business, so part of our business is done online. The SiteTrail tool will prove very helpful for us so that we can understand the other websites that are attracting customers who prefer to shop online. I'm looking forward to using each of these tools!