Dig Deeper: How To Use Social Media For B2B Marketing
Measure Your Brand's Online Influence: Twitalyzer
"I was goaded into using Twitter several years ago by friends," Peterson says. "I didn't have a sense whether or not my use of the medium was having an impact. Being a measurement guy, I had to have some numbers. So I went out and tried some of the services… and I was really unsatisfied.
Twitalyzer avoids focusing on "more narcissistic measures of personal self worth and ego" and collects "hard data" in the form of Impact, Engagement, Velocity, Reach, and several other metrics, which allow you to understand how you use Twitter.
"We've given our customers the ability to take everything out of that metrics dashboard except the stuff that's important to them," says Peterson. "We have 30 metrics, but if you want to track your Impact, Engagement, follower count, and the number of unique people retweeting your message, you can just strip everything out of that dashboard and you can just look at those five metrics."
Twitalyzer even allows you incorporate your Klout and PeerIndex scores, but this tool's strength is allowing you to assess the power of each individual tweet, telling you which of your trends and topics are most popular.
"We're aggregating these metrics so businesses can take a broad view and say, 'What's moving, and what's not moving? Which of these metrics do we care about?'" Peterson says.
Other notable features include benchmarks, a way to compare your data with that of influential people you follow on Twitter, as well as subscription plans that offer special features like in-depth analysis, competitive account tracking, phone support, and API access.
Dig Deeper: How To Get Retweeted
Measure Your Brand's Online Influence: CrowdBooster
"At first we were interested in customer service, and we found there's really a lack of tools for people to do their jobs. Most times, their jobs aren't super well-defined, " says David Tran, co-founder of Crowdbooster, a Twitter analytics start-up based in Menlo Park, California. "That's where we started."
Tran, along with co-founders Ricky Yean and Mark Linsey, set out to "figure out how to help social media managers and community managers, actually define what their job is, and get better at it."
"A lot of analytics give you nice graphs but you can't figure out anything from the graphs," says Tran. "With some tools, you only get that single score and you can't figure out how you can actually increase the score and do better. That's really where we wanted to hone in: How can we quickly show someone how well they're doing and quickly tell them what they can do right away to do better?"
Crowdbooster—funded by Y Combinator—also focuses exclusively on Twitter, but its tracking service it also lets a user see the full reach of their tweets. It keeps track of your follower growth, top retweeters and your most influential followers. Your tweets are presented on a scatter plot graph, making it easy to view which tweets and topics garnered the most engagement.
Crowdbooster also recommends specific times during the day to tweet, based on the times your most influential followers are most active. To top it off, the program also allows you to schedule reminder notifications to tweet.
"Measuring numbers and bringing numbers up isn't the endgame," Tran says. "The endgame is talking to your loyal customers and helping out your brand."
Dig Deeper: How to Use Location-Based Social Networks for Your Business
Measure Your Brand's Online Influence: Take a Longview
Measuring online influence can be useful—and has potential to reinforce your social-media strategy (hey, it just feels cool when you get a high score)—particularly for growing brands looking to utilize technology to make their jobs easier and more effective. However, it's not for everyone.
"Caring about raising your score, obsession about score, there's definitely an element of vanity and ego there," says Fernandez. "But this stuff definitely has a real impact on your life."
"Businesses are used to measuring the effects of things they do in a digital medium, and Twitter is just another marketing channel," Peterson says. "If you're a person, don't worry about it. Just use Twitter and have a good time. But if you're a business, it's just like everything else you do in the digital world."
