5 Free Tools To Track Social Media Engagement

I’m frequently asked by good orgs that I support to share their work, and sometimes they ask me the best way to track the engagement that’s occurred. I’ve compiled a list of some free tracking tools that can really benefit you personally, or that can help out your org. These could be especially useful with all of the end-of-year campaigns coming up (including the CrowdRise Holiday Challenge that I’m helping to fund).

5 Free Tracking Tools to Help You Out:

1.  bitly – bitly is a great way for you to shorten links and then track their click through rates. If you sign up for an account, you can store all of the links that you’ve shortened, and then track how well the link is performing with your audience. It’s possible to shorten links without signing up for an account, but if you get a free account, you’ll be able to access historical data.

Just click “view stats” and you’ll have insight into:

• How many times the link has been clicked;
• The percentage of clicks;
• The number of bitly links that have been created from your original URL, and who created them (if the person has a public account);
• The date that the link was clicked, and an hourly breakdown;
• What social media platforms the bitly was shared on;
• Where the link was shared geographically, and where the most clicks were coming from;

2.  Topsy – Topsy allows you to analyze conversations in realtime, and  provides instant social insight. You can analyze any topic, term, or hashtag.

Once you conduct your search, you’ll have access to a few different stats:

• All web mentions of your term, topic, or hashtag – or you can specify that Topsy just shows you links, Tweets, photos, videos, or influencers that relate to your search;
• You can sort by language;
• You can sort by relevance, newest, or oldest;
• You are able to view the Tweets per day that mention your search, and from there you can view top Tweets;
• Topsy reveals how many Tweets mention your search over the past 15 days, and it provides a Topsy sentiment score;
• You can chart replies to your Twitter handle and view when the most people are responding, and what they’re saying;

3.  Twubs – If you plan on hosting a tweetchat or having a hashtag livestream at an event, Twubs allows you to register a hashtag. Once you register the hashtag, you can update event details or hashtag details and create a page for your particular hashtag. Once the page is setup, you can set up a main account (i.e. your org’s Twitter handle) for the hashtag that will show up in a different, prime stream.

Other features include:

• Scheduling Twitter Chats that will show up in Twub’s global calendar;
• Adding additional hashtags to stream on your main hashtag page;
• Customizing your hashtag page to match your branding;
• Watching the livestream of your Tweets as people use your hashtag;
• Adding websites that may be relevant to your hashtag;
• Allowing other folks to be admins for your particular Twubs hashtag;
• Blocking trolls and spammers (don’t feed the trolls!), as well as blocking words that you don’t want included in the stream;
• A moderated fullscreen feed module that allows you to control a customizable fullscreen display of Tweets that you can project anywhere;

4.  Twitter Counter – Twitter Counter is a really good site to track your Twitter stats.

The free version will track:

• How many followers you have and how many you are following;
• Your increase of followers over a period of time (you can choose the time period);
• Comparisons between you and your competitors or partners;
• Increases or decreases in followers, Tweets, and folks you are following from the previous day;
• Your daily average follows, tweets, and following;

5.   socialmention* – Similar to Topsy, socialmention* allows for real-time social media searches and analysis, but has more filters for types of medium . The site will show you trends underneath the search bar if you’re interested in perusing, or you can type in your own trend that you want to search. For example, if you want to type in keywords from a blog post you published last week, or the name of your org, you’ll get a variety of results.

Results will show you:

• socialmention*’s perceived sentiment of the keyword or phrase you typed in;
• The last time the search phrase was mentioned;
• A list of top related keywords;
• The top users who have mentioned the search phrase;
• How many unique authors are talking about it;
• The top related hashtags;
• The sources from which the results were pulled;

 

What tools have you found to be useful, folks?