by By: Hallie White
The first part of our final project for the course is to monitor our client’s social media presence. We are tasked to check out the current conversations happening around our client’s organization and industry in general. Some questions to ask are: What are people tweeting about when it comes to this organization? What hashtags are they using? Are there any active fan pages or critics of this organization?
It can seem a bit daunting to research not only what an organization is publicly posting on its own platforms but also what others are saying about it. Have no fear. To make your research a bit easier, consider checking out some of the following tools. (On top of the leading tools we’ve discussed in class). Most of them are free or offer free trails that you can use for our final project.
Social Mention is super simple to use. In the search bar, type in an organization’s name and it will aggregate data from individual users that mention the organization. You are able to see how often people are posting about it as well as the sentiment (positive/negative). In my experience, I can get a quick glimpse about a topic or organization through Social Mention, but sometimes there is scarce data (But ask yourself, what does that mean? Dig deeper.)
2. Tweet Reach
After logging in to Tweet Reach, you can find the answer to the question: “How far did those tweets actually go?” by identifying your organization’s Twitter reach based on the Tweet Reach algorithm. It will also measure impressions, tweets with the most interaction, and identify an organization’s top contributors on Twitter.
3. Topsy
Similar to Tweet Reach, Topsy allows you to identify anyone who is mentioning an organization. You can also track keywords and even domain names. Its data lasts all the way back to the beginning of Twitter, so you can select tweets “Of All Time”. But, depending on the organization, the buzz might not go back that far. You can also identify influencers and compare to what different software told you.
Great blog post, Hallie!
It is especially important for us to look into these tools as we begin our work with our clients. I was really interested to learn about Tweet Reach, as it was something I had never heard of before. It is so important that we see the impact that our client’s tweets really have. It is so easy for tweets to get lost in the shuffle, as Twitter is so fast-paced. I was familiar with Topsy before reading your post, and I am so glad that you included it. It offers such great information when analyzing Twitter.
Thanks for the insight, Hallie!
These sights will be perfect for us to begin digging into the social media presence our company has and what others are saying as well. My team is doing our project on a hotel; some of the mentions we have found have been interesting to say the least (we found someone had made a YouTube video rating the elevators…). It will be great to utilize these tools as well!
Thanks for all the resources Hallie! These will definitely come in handy for our final project. My group’s client really wants to improve its presence on Twitter so using Tweet Reach and Topsy will help us figure out who’s mentioning our organization, what impact it has towards its followers and the major demographics from its audience as well! Can’t wait to utilize these tools.
Hallie,
Nice links – I haven’t personally seen these so it was nice to check them out. I think with all the different types of media tools it can be hard at times to find what works well for your client. I’ve found the best thing to do is to try them all and make a note or two about your experience: did you find what you needed? Did it complicate something that should be easy? Was it easy to setup? All these different questions are important to ask yourself when using new media tools.
Great timely post Hallie! Thank you for sharing these tools with everyone. They will come in handy as supplements to tools that Kelli mentioned.
These are great resources for finding where your posts end up and how far they go. I will find Topsy especially useful because people often tweet about or share picture of my job’s property but they do not always know that they can tag us so it will be nice to be able to get notifications of these types of tweets.
Hallie,
I really appreciate this blog post. I am having a difficult time finding much of anything about my client on their social media platforms, let alone mentions from their target audience. One of the largest problems I am facing is that my client is operating in business to business sales. Do you feel that business to business organizations function the same way on social media platforms? Should they be trying to have conversations with their consumer? And what would this look like?
-Katie McGuigan
@knmcguigan
Thanks for awesome article, Hallie! Have you come accross on Brand24 (http://brand24.net) in your research? I think that you can be interested in testing it! 🙂 It provides high-end monitoring and analytics for super-affordable price. I would love to show it to you sometime 🙂
These recommendations are sweet! Thanks for narrowing it down to a select few platforms for analysis — with these final projects and all the monitoring resources out there it can get a little confusing.
Thanks for these tools, Hallie! I think when it comes to measurement tools it can be hard to choose which ones to use. This will definitely help when it comes to monitoring for our final projects!
Thanks for these tips.
Tweet Reach was a really helpful tool that actually really moved our project along nicely.
Great post! I think that by monitoring your firms social media presence you can often find ways to improve your business and therefore positively impact your bottom line. You just have to be ready to listen. These recommendations are great – I will remember them for future use! Some of them I hadn’t heard of so thank you for teaching something new.
Hi Hallie,
I LOVE your post! Quick, concise, to the points, and SUPER useful. I actually just checked out all 3 of the tools and they are really interactive and easy to use! I just wish I had checked this out earlier when working on my final project. But regardless, I will definitely keep these in mind when creating social media audits in the future.
-Alysia
Hallie –
I love how straight forward your blog post is. Before your blog post I had never heard of Topsy and definitely found it useful when conducting our final social media audit project. This really helps in monitoring and listening to what people are saying about different brands and organizations. Thanks for the new tips!