37 Awesome Tools For Tracking Your Social Media Influence

Was This Useful?

There are a tonne of social media platforms out there to track your social media influence, some more well known than others. If you are going to use them to market your online business, build brand awareness or drive traffic then you need to know how effective your efforts are. Doing anything on social media without this data is just time wasting (don't fool yourself – you're just being distracted unless you have the data to know what is working).

So I made this list for you: 37 Social media metrics, influence, authority and analytics tools you can use to track your social media success. Some are free, some are paid, some track just one thing, others a whole multitude of things. There are many more than these 37… but right now these guys are the best.

This list is in no particular order, I might have them in order or I might have saved the best till last… read it and find out… And try them… use them and hopefully you'll get better results from less effort because you'll know what to focus on.

 

1.Hootsuite

• Hootsuite is a great place to start. You can link a number of social accounts, schedule posts and tracks mentions, comments and shares for your posts. Stats are limited but it’s a great place to start. Also if you only link 3 or less accounts then it’s free

2.Social Mention

• is a tool similar to Google alerts (see below) which will give you insight into what is being said about your company, by whom and what the general tone is. You can set it up to alert you via rss or email to let you know of real time mentions.

3.Facebook Insights

• built right into all of your Facebook pages is the Facebook insights dashboard which will give you  data to track your reach and virality which can help you understand your audience better over time.

4.Twitter Analytics

• this is the twitter version of the Facebook insights dash. Built into your twitter account is data about your tweets, you timeline activity, the tweets that were favorited, retweeted, and replied to. It will track mentions, new followers and newly followed details as well… so that’s nice.

5.Google Analytics

• The mother of all analytics programs tracks not only all your website traffic, sources, visitor actions and many many other details, you can also set up specific goals, and track any campaign you choose on whatever platform you want. You have to set up a unique tracking link (just google how – or go here to use the google link shortener) and then just use it for all your posts etc.

6.Google Alerts

• One of the most useful tools for tracking mentions anywhere on the web. For each name or company name (or whatever you want to track) you can set up an individual alert which, as soon as a mention happens somewhere online) can rss or email you an alert about that mention. It’s like cyber stalking for anyone that mentions your company name, anywhere.

7.Custom Social Media Reports (for google analytics)

• another free service by Google which takes analysis of traffic sources to the next level if you are blogging or creating new content on a regular basis. If you have a static site it’s probably not worth playing with but if you are publishing content regularly it can give you easy to install – one click reporting with all your content and how it’s doing across the net.

8.Bitly

• is a link shortener which tracks all the clicks and data from each link you’ve shortened. This means that you can quickly use it to track different sources all leading to the same place and see how each source did separately.

9.Tagboard

• If you are using hashtags, especially if you’ve created your own, Tagboard will help you track those tags and the conversations around it. If you are using a hashtag you did not create it will give you insight into the conversation that’s happening around that tag. …But it’s great if you just start your own hashtag… much more fun.

 

10.Tweetdeck (by twitter)

• This was an independent app but twitter bought them out because it was such a great tool. This is especially good if you are monitoring many twitter accounts. For large companies or if you are using twitter as a customer service point of contact then this is a great tool for making sure you don’t miss any mentions. It also tracks your hashtags for you.

11.Twitonomy

• More useful twitter stats with stacks of detailed analytics. It also comes with a free and a very affordable version to track all your twitter accounts.

12.Buffer

• Buffer is not unlike hootsuite, schedule in your posts for the day, or the week and it will post timed content to the channels you choose. This is really useful if you want to go away or even if you just set up your social posts for the week, and walk away. It will also give you great data about how your posts have been received.

13.Tweetreach

• another tool for tracking conversations or campaigns on Twitter. By entering a hashtag or just a keyword TweetReach will search for related tweets and tell you reach, exposure, sharing activity and who the main influencers are.

14.Keyhole

• Not totally twitter focused? Keyhole will track hashtags, keywords and campaigns across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as well. It’s got a free version but it’s really only a sampler to show you what it can do, which is give you good tools for tracking your reach across these social platforms all at once.

15.SemRush

• SEM Rush will show you where your website ranks and for what. Drop in your URL and it will show you keywords it ranks for. It will also show you, if you have a content driven site where your various pages and articles show up in Google, and who doesn’t want to see that?

16.Woopra

• Woopra   Gives you the opportunity to sync your customer database and then track individual users on your site, where they go, what they read, what actions they take etc. Yes it’s kind of like cyber stalking but it can also give you a better understanding of what your customers are doing on your site and maybe you can develop a better service because of it.

17.Klout

• Is more of a personal social influence measurement. Once you link your various social accounts it rates you with a social influence score and gives you insight into who the influencers are in your market which can be useful if you are looking for partners or mentions.

18.Oneload

• Once upon a time tube-mogul was a way to upload your video to many different sites all at once. Then it became “oneload” and developed a rich set of metrics which tells you the reach, views, embeds and even audience geography across multiple channels. And yes you can still upload your vids to many platforms at once which is a huge timesaver.

19.Youtube Analytics

• Being owned by Google of course youtube has a rich set of analytics tools to tell you all kinds of detailed metrics about your videos. Too many tools to play with to mention here – just dive and and see what it came come up with.

20.Alexa, Compete and Quantcast

• these guys track how your site is doing over time and compared to your competitors. They aren’t as accurate as Google Analytics but they do provide useful guesstimates on the demographics of who comes to your website.

21.Feedburner

• Another one which, if you are creating a content rich blog, is great for tracking average subscribers, reach, popular items and other factoids. You have to set up your own feed but it’s not hard and can find interesting hidden ways in which your content is being consumed.

22.PostRank

• Gives you detailed info on your tweets, stumbles, diggs and friend feed all in one place. The free version allows you to track up to 5 sites… which means you can track your own site and 4 competitors… mwa ha haa.

23.Flickr

• If you are uploading pictures to Flickr then it also has it’s own dashboard which will show you how your pickies are trending, how many people have added to galleries and other interesting data bits.

24.SeoQuake

• this is a great tool if you’re using Mozilla Firefox which can help you if you are into the SEO ramifications of any social media or website project. While not strictly a social media tool it can help you tweak and track the effect your social media is having on your website.

25.Social Report

• is a social analytics tools which can give you detailed and comprehensive analytics on the performance of your interactions on various social platforms. It can help you specifically track the effect your social media campaigns are having on your website performance.

26.Technorati & Blogpulse

• these guys are basically blog search engines but, they can help track your influence and authority. Additionally they are also useful for finding others in your niche who have influence and a following which can be useful for making connections, guest posting and making other contributions to increase your own authority.

27.Google Trends

• Nothing to do with your personal social media metrics but great for seeing what’s happening around the web on certain keywords or topics. It will also show where your stuff has turned up in Google news stories and the geographical area your readers come from.

28.Triberr

• Not so much a social media tool but a way to find other bloggers and website owners you are into the same things as you are. You can add the Triberr plugin to your wordpress site and every article you post gets posted inside Triberr for others in your ‘tribes’ to see, read and share on their own site or social media networks. You’re dealing here with other content producers who are looking to share and be shared.

29.Buzz Sumo

• One of the best tools on this list. Enter a topic or a keyword and Buzz sumo will show you the top content for that keyword. It’s a great insight into what people are liking and sharing on several social media platforms so you can create stuff that people love to share.

30.Spike

• While we’re on the subject of working out what people love to share on social media Spike, while it’s meant for newsrooms and it quite pricey, is a fantastic tool for seeing what content is pre-viral… yes, pre viral is a thing now. something that is trending in the same way as previously viral content but has not got to ‘take off’ phase yet. You can hitch your caboose to the trend with your own content and join the ride up.

31.Open Site Explorer (by moz)

• Open site explorer is a great way of finding who is linking to your website and even what anchor text they used to to so. This will show back links from websites as well as social media links pointing to you

32.ahrefs

• aHrefs is another way to check your backlinks or mentions that your website has received. It will give you anchor text on backlinks, geographical areas people are visiting your site from and it assigns your site with a rank and authority score (ahrefs domain rank) as well as how many social mentions your site has received. Mostly for SEO tuning of your site but great for seeing how you rate in the world and how you can improve.

 

33.Onlywire

• Not so much a way of tracking your reach (although it does measure engagement) but included in this list because you can link up 50 or more different social media platforms, including several accounts for each platform and in one swift action, post to them all. It’s a huge timesaver and well worth looking at.

 

34.Locowise

• Another social media analytics platform which allows you to track several social media platforms, but where most stop short of including Instagram this one will help you track your Instagram metrics.

 

35.Iconosquare

• Instagram specific metrics for your IG account. There are some major players using this platform who are using Instagram to market their products… so it must be good.

 

36.Pinterest Analytics

• Pinterest is incredibly viral. People just love sharing stuff on Pinterest, so it only makes sense would have it’s own analytics platform to show you all the shares and interactions for your pins. You have to have a business account to make this happen but when you think about all the juicy traffic a good Pinterest campaign can bring – it’s worth it.

 

37.Google+ Ripples

• While Google+ has some built in metrics to show you the reach of your posts there is also another (semi) hidden feature. Google ripples will show you not only the reach of any public post but who is sharing, who’s share had the most influence and how all the sharers are connected. It’s a brilliant insight which can allow you to connect with those who have powerful social authority.

 

Obviously you are not going to use all of these platforms since there is some overlap between many of them. It's worth checking them all out though to see what is going to suit your business and marketing strategy.

Whatever you choose, just make sure you use SOMEThing to track the results of your social media marketing efforts.

The next article I'll be working on will discuss exactly what metrics you should be paying attention to and what you should do with the information… I'll let you know wen that is done.