How To Measure Your Brand’s Social Engagement

Social media has brought significant changes in the way we communicate with each other and build relationships. For brands, social media platforms have made it easier for businesses to create a community and promote their brand online.

In fact, social media has given people a way to freely express their opinions and experiences online about a brand, company, or people. These opinions can be positive or negative, but they do not determine how successful you are on social media.

When you use social as a mean for engagement or other purposes like brand recognition, brand awareness, or reach, it's important for you to track your progress and evaluate the impact. There are many different monitoring tools available online that can help you determine how effective your social engagement is.

Monitoring your social media accounts, often referred to as social listening, can help you gain compelling insights about your competitors, customers, and other industry influencers. Many of the tools listed below offer free accounts, which will allow you to use different tools to monitor your social account and create strong reports on your social performance.

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1. Hootsuite

As one of the best monitoring tools (available for free) to schedule social updates, Hootsuite allows you to monitor different social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Google+, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Their weekly reports of analytics provide valuable insight into the performance of your social accounts. It's convenient, easy to use, and especially great for entrepreneurs and business owners that are managing social media by themselves.

Hootsuite also allows you to see mentions of your page. You can also search specific keywords for certain social platforms to see the latest posts or tweet regarding those terms. In fact, the specific keyword search can also be saved as a stream on your dashboard.

In addition, Hootsuite offers a mobile app, which allows you to monitor your social media accounts on the go.

2. TweetReach

TweetReach is a great tool for businesses that are interested in keeping track of where their tweets have traveled.  It provides information on the conversations about your brand.

This tool provides users with a set of metrics that can help you understand an idea's reach on Twitter, including all the mentions for a specific search term.

TweetReach is a great way to find the influential followers. It can also guide you towards the audience that are talking about your brand.

3. Klout

Surprisingly, Klout is a hit or miss for many of their users. You can find people who hate this tool for its inaccurate scoring system and difficulty in achieving their missions. There are also many people who find this tool quite useful, as it gives a score on how influential you are. This tool can measure your performance with your social Tweets and suggest a variety of content that is related to your industry and expertise.

The scoring system of Klout is usually based on three specific features including:

1. True reach: size of the actively engaged audience
2. Amplification: the number of tweets, mentioned, and retweets for your social updates
3. Network Impact: evaluates the influence of engaged audience

4. Social Mention

This is a popular tool for many social marketers. It is a simple platform that allows you to search for specific terms across 80+ social media properties. Their in-depth analysis evaluates the content based on four categories, including Sentiment, Strength, Passion and Reach.

5. Twazzup

This is a great tool, especially for the beginners who have just started using social media and in search of a Twitter monitoring tool. All you need to do is enter the username you want to track and you will get real-time updates. Twazzup is able to help you find the most active influencers, best-retweeted photos, top links, and the top 10 keywords relevant to your search. This efficient monitoring tool bridges the gap between the real-time search of Twitter and a traditional search engine.

6. Addictomatic

If you want to get an overall view of your brand, Addictomatic is able to do just that. Similar to Twazzup, it's an easy tool that focuses on monitoring a variety of platforms like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Big News, Word Press, Google, Ask.com, and many more. It helps you to stay up to date with the most recent developments in the industry and any news regarding your brand. This tool is designed to simplify the search procedures and putting all the information on a single screen. This saves your time and effort to explore different sites.

7. HowSociable

This is a handy tool that helps you monitor your brand and your competitor's social media presence. It has a slightly different approach towards measuring your engagement. It splits the score based on different social media platforms, which allows you to easily keep track of your performance based on the specific platform. HowSociable allows you to understand which platform you're performing better in and which platform you may need to work on. The tool is free and gives you the ability to track 12 social networking sites.

8. IceRocket

IceRocket works effectively for monitoring your social engagement over Facebook, Twitter, and your business' blog. The tool is offered in 20 different languages and display results in the form of graphs. Additionally, it also allows you to choose the specific time period that you want to monitor. With approximately 200 million blogs in their database, you can find the specific blogger's activity. IceRocket also determines the latest terms trending surrounding your search.

9. TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is one of my favourite tools. It looks similar to Hootsuite, but only monitors your Twitter account. It covers the critical needs of any Twitter user by allowing you to schedule tweets, monitor your messages and interactions, track hashtags, and manage multiple accounts.

The only drawback it has is their lack of regular updates, which makes the tool prone to bugs.

10. Mention

Mention is a great tool to monitor different websites, blogs, and social platforms to stay up to date with recent news. Mention is very similar to Google Alerts and allows you to get the latest update on a specific term. However, Mention provides you with more results. In addition to blog and news surrounding your specific term, it can also find social results in Twitter and Facebook.

You can easily use your company's name as a term to track and receive email updates whenever your brand is mentioned online. In addition, Mention provides statistics about your brand mentions online.

11. Topsy

Topsy allows you to find tweets that can be dated as far back as 2006. Whether you want to look for photos, links, or videos related to a specific term, Topsy is able to provide you with relevant results.

This tool allows you to review all the shares for a specific piece of content, find influencers for a specific topic, find content related to a specific topic or person, and even all the tweets that are linked to a specific website.

Topsy is easy to use and provides analytic tracking, which allows you to track a specific or topic. You can even compare tweets between two or more domains as well.

12. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is the perfect tool for determining, analyzing, and optimizing your brand’s online presence for social growth. It specifically focuses on Twitter analytics.

If you are planning to do outreach campaigns, you can use Followerwonk to track your social engagements and relationships. You can even compare your brand’s social media presence with a competitor's as well.

Followerwonk is free, but you can sign up for a Moz Pro subscription to get full reports on your Twitter, including engagement metrics and different search features.

There are plenty of other tools that are easily available over internet. Choose the one that suits your preferences to the best.