What statistics do you go by? Simply having a large number of “followers” or “likes” whilst nice, is not necessarily enough. For example, Lady Gaga has just under 33 million followers on Twitter so does that make her infinitely stronger than Apple who have NO followers (well perhaps that’s due to them not having a twitter page but you get my point)?
Not only must you have an audience, but you must also communicate and stimulate conversation on your pages to achieve true social media success.
This can be difficult to measure on Twitter, Google+ et al. as they surprisingly fail to provide these statistics and tools by default. Fortunately for you, we’ve reviewed 4 free, effective 3rd party tools which can aid in checking your social media status, so you too can discover the truth.
So you’ve chosen the red pill.
- Google+ Ripples
- A tool which allows you to view the reaction your individual comments and status updates make on the Google+ community. This means you can see who has shared each status you have released. Allowing you to see not only that your audience notice your posts, but also that they respond or find it amusing. A simple pros and cons list will show that the positives are that Ripples is free and easy to use as it is integrated into Google+. The main negative is that it only applies to publicly released posts however, for most, this won’t be an issue. This great article explains how you may have missed this feature’s release as many seem to have.
- Findpeopleonplus.com
- A website which allows you to filter through the 44.5 million Google+ users and 300k brands based on general demographics such as age, gender, occupation, country, city and so on. This is obviously useful for those searching for people with particular characteristics. Helpfully, Findpeopleonplus also suggests people to follow based on your search. Again, the positives are it does what it says it does, it is free and it is easy to use. The only negative I found was that it can operate slowly once you have a few filters set up. Ghacks has done a more substantial review so check their article if you want more information
- Author Crawler
- Author Crawler is a free program for Google+ which allows you to discover backlinks to a URL and crawl them to look for authorship. The program is designed essentially so you can see who is following you and where your followers also contribute. The idea behind it being that it aids in link building. If you see one of your followers is also publishing on another reputable website it might prove…beneficial to build up a relationship. Tom Anthony, the creator of Author Crawler explains on SEOmoz the potential importance this program could have in the future. A word of warning, whilst the website may look attractive and easy to navigate, setting up this program is anything but. Only attempt this if you are competent with computers and command lines.
- Followerwonk.com
- Followerwonk is not exactly what you’d call free. Perhaps shareware or “basically-free-but-some-features-restricted-ware” would be a more appropriate description. Don’t be fooled though. The free version has some cool features. The first is how easy it is to use and that it requires no sign up. That means you can compare your Twitter account to anyone. Haven’t you always wanted to compare apples with oranges? Finally I can see whether how Nike stacks up to Unicef (just so you know of the 24055 people they follow, they only share 20. Does that make Nike only 0.1% charitable?). Anyway, the true purpose of the feature is to compare your page to competitors; whether it be to see what followers you share or who you both share. You can even compare up to three pages. Secondly, Followerwonk shows your Twitter account’s “influence”. This is based on Klout’s overly complicated algorithm. It scores your Twitter account out of 100 based on number of followers, how often they mention you or message you, your following to follower ratio and so forth. The higher the better as it essentially means what you say has more impact. The people and companies who have the highest influence don’t have the highest follower numbers, proof that sheer volume doesn’t count for everything.
Hopefully you too can utilise some if not all of these tools to discover your true influence on your “successful” social media pages. Be sure to let us know if you find these useful in the comment section below or if there are any other great tools we may have missed.
This post was first published on CreativeAgencySecrets the new business development blog