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This is the last post in my series – How to Measure Reach and Quantify Social Media Campaigns. It’s essentially a listing of tools that you can use to help you monitor and manage all the different streams.

These tools are all free, and it is noted that there are some services out there that you can pay for who will do this for you. This list is intended to help out those folks who either don’t have a budget to pay for monitoring, or for those who still need to convince the budget holders in their organization that social media does/can work and that you need to be more involved.

I’ve tried to also stick with sites that for the most part you don’t need to be heavily involved with/active to and can easily grab the info you need without spending a lot of time there.

Tweetburner: Shortens urls and tells you the number of times a url you shortened was clicked on.

Twitt(url)y: Twitturly is a service for tracking what urls people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.

Twitter Search: Lets you search for any conversations taking place based on urls, keywords, or Twitter handles.

BUDurl: This service takes Tweetburner one step further, it allows you to shorten urls and track them across any media.

Google Analytics: Use it to tell what social media sites people are coming from and use the Grease Monkey Plug in to understand what people are doing on your site to promote it outside.

AideRSS: Enter the url of your feed (if you have a blog) and it will return information about the posts, including which how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites.

AddThis: If you have an account with AddThis, they will tell you how many times someone used the AddThis feature.

Xinureturns: lets you find out how your (campaign for example) micro/website is doing. Just type in the url and you’ll get tons of stats ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more. Good to look at how your competitors sites are doing too!

Feedburner: Allows you to see how many people are subscribing on average to your feed if you have a blog or podcast. It also allows some simple tracking to understand what people are clicking on and where visitors are coming from and going to.

Technorati: Allows you to see who’s talking about you in their blogs, or find out who is linking to your blog.

Google Blog Search: As above, but I find more comprehensive.

Blog Catalog: As above, but has additional features for sharing and rating.

Blogscope: is an analysis and visualization tool for the blog world, developed by the University of Toronto, allows you to search on keywords to find out what’s happening in the blog world (great for product searches) and when activity spiked.

Google Alert: Create alerts for your name, company, product, campaign and keep track of what’s being aid where.

TweetBeep: The Google Alerts for twitter : Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything! You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like tinyurl.com).

Spokeo: This is a bit more personal and kind of big brother like. Spokeo monitors 41 different social media sites (and growing) and reports what your friends are doing on each), I’m not sure how to use this effectively for companies yet.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, so I’d love to hear what other tools you use to help you keep track of what’s going on in the social media space when it comes to your company, product or campaign.

UPDATE: @jowyang tweeted this article this morning with additional monitoring tools that might be of interest! Enjoy, there are a couple of really good ones I indeed did miss.

Photo Credit: Juliaf; Stock.xcng

Over the course of the last two posts I’ve established what should be measured and how to go about getting the data. But now you’re likely overwhelmed at the ton of numbers you’re left with.

Let’s look at your total Reach number, which is the total number of conversations, shares and site visits. For the sake of this post, we’ll use the following numbers:

Conversations: 200; Sharing: 300; Site visits 1,500;
Total Reach: 2,000

Remember, this doesn’t include any banner-ad visitors or any other measures, just the three identified groups.

Now, what did you spend on your social-media campaign? Well, let’s see. What’s the social-media campaign? What kinds of things are included?

Keep in mind this number may be a little bit higher as your total Reach number may not be a unique number since we can’t confirm if someone conversed, shared and visited the site. If you want to look at it from an overly cautious way, you can then take the 2,000 Reached and divide that by three (which gives you about 667 or something else if you believe in superstitions). Your cost per person Reached would now be $150. These are two very different numbers, but it’s a range that you can begin to use for budgeting.

You’ll need to work something out that’s right for you based on what you think people are doing or what the numbers tell you. If you have more people sharing than visitors to your website, I’m going to guess that you can safely assume people are doing at least two of the three items.

The point of the matter is that the Reach Formula should be defined campaign to campaign, and that it should evolve depending on the social nature of what is actually taking place.

Eventually, you as a company should be able to benchmark and create your own personal average, and perhaps as an industry if this were tracked. There are some hard numbers that you can put beside it, but for right now, each campaign is different.

If you can go a step further and determine the number of people who took an action that you wanted as a result of getting to the page, you would have your total conversion number. Perhaps you also had a way for people to purchase offline if they quoted a specific code that was only given out in a video… Say you have a conversion rate of 20% of those who landing on the landing page – that gives us 300 conversions and a cost of $334 for each person who converted.

Now, how does that compare to what your company pays for each new customer acquisition (i.e. what is your customer worth in the long run, and therefore what are you willing to spend to get that customer in the first place?)

And how does this compare to what you would normally pay per person to see your message? When you factor in all the associated costs and not just media?

Compare it to the numbers you just created – where does it fit in? Now you should have some pretty compelling numbers one way or the other to either suggest why you need to spend more money or time on the medium, or why you need to improve what you’re doing. Or perhaps it’s proof that your customers just aren’t quite ready for your brand to be in the space.

If the latter is the case, it’s not necessary to abandon ship right away; it just might be time to better understand how they want you to interact with them in this space.

The final post in this series will be links to many tools used in the measurement/monitoring of the space now, and will likely be heavy on the Twitter links. If you have any links you think are worth mentioning, please let me know and I’ll be happy to include them.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

Direct Costs for media (such as Facebook; not banner-ad related, but would include any costs for blogger pitches)
- Agency costs
- Creative costs (Facebook, Twitter profile, website, video, etc.)
- Cost of internal hours for coordination
- Cost of hours for Facebook, Twittering and media monitoring
- Cost of hours for report analysis
- Cost of hours for responding and interaction
- Percentage of product-sample cost (Yes, some of the offline samples should be included as you want people to go online and talk about their sample. You’ll have to gauge accordingly based on online product-sample costs for blogger pitches, but I’ve used 60% here.)