CoTweet: Proactive marketing solution

1 CoTweet is a powerhouse for Twitter accounts when you have multiple team members tweeting. It allows for scheduling, tracking and adding notes. Nonprofits can manage up to six Twitter accounts for free using the Standard edition. The ability to track past conversations is a great utility to remind you where you stand with each contact. You can also assign specific people to on-duty status. The Enterprise edition costs about $1,500 per month and is worth it for medium to large organizations. With this edition, you can manage campaigns, assign tasks and integrate the tool with third-party apps such as Salesforce.com. On the other hand, the interface is lacking and the analytics could be better. It also allows for Facebook management.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile

MediaFunnel: The app for team tweeting

2 Media Funnel allows for more of your staff to be involved with the tweeting process. It supports multiple user types — admins, publishers, contributors and guests — and tweets can be placed in a queue for editorial review by a publisher or administrator. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported. This tool also integrates with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Twilio and Klout. The free plan allows for two users and no brand monitoring, while the standard plan offers many features and costs $1 per user per month or $1 per social media account, whichever is greater.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, Android, Blackberry

Timely: Make your tweets count

3Timely analyzes your past 199 Twitter updates to determine what times during the day people are most likely to read your posts. You can schedule tweets to go live at those times and can use the bookmarklet to tweet links without leaving your current page. You can tweet right away or add the message to your queue. It’s free.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Klout: Measuring online influence

4 Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone (Social Score), Android

Twylah: Branded pages for your Twitter account

5Twylah creates one page that sums up your nonprofit brand. This custom page automatically organizes your tweets into topics that you tweet about most often. Users can interact on your page by retweeting and responding to messages. The biggest benefits this tool brings are for SEO. Google no longer indexes tweets, but it does index each Twylah page and the tweets within it, giving your tweets a longer life. It also offers PowerTweets, which creates a separate landing page for your tweets with other recommended messages. It’s good to use this for blog posts, but if you do it too much, you might annoy your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Qwitter: Find out who unfollows you

6Qwitter lets you know when someone stops following you after your last tweet, so you can identify what might have made them unfollow you. This free tool automatically e-mails you when someone unfollows you. If you’re a nonprofit and you tweet about sports and then three people immediately unfollow you, you might want to keep your messages more on topic.
Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

LiveIntent: Cultivate your following

7With its Discovery Window, LiveIntent lets you turn static social media Follow Us buttons into dynamic windows on your site. The start-up says the intent is to grow your following and fans, while improving SEO and driving additional revenues from “sponsored introductions,” which are based on common interests and level of engagement. The window dynamically adjusts recommendations for each user and each page.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Twitpay: Send and receive money via Twitter

8Twitpay is a simple, secure way to enable your supporters to make donations to your cause and to quickly spread the word. It’s free to use use, however, it does charge a percentage of the donations actually paid including a small fee per transaction. They say they have over 45 nonprofit clients including CARE, the National Wildlife Federation and the Children’s Miracle Network.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Optify: Marketing solutions for the real-time web

9Optify is robust business management tool that lets you set up real-time alerts to track specific keywords and provides useful insight into your social media activity. You can create and track Twitter campaigns, and it gives insight into how well visitors from Twitter convert into leads. Optify also offers many other optimization tools to find keywords, improve your website and more. The free edition only allows for one user and tracks five keywords. The basic version costs $99 per month and allows you to track up to 250 keywords. The professional version is $500 per month and allows for 10 users and 2,000 keywords.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

JustCoz: Increasing awareness about your causes

10 An online relay system built for charities and nonprofits, JustCoz gives Twitter users the ability to donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes. Once someone signs up, a tweet will automatically be sent from their account once per day with your customized message. This tool can help raise awareness for a campaign, however, all messages go out at once and you only have the option to send the same message to all of your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Klout: Measure influence and style

Klout is a visual, logical way to quickly see the main thing most organizations want to know about Twitter: where you stand against the competition. The application’s initial strength is the ease with which you can compare yourself to your peers. After using Klout for about a month, however, the information becomes more advanced, if not just downright complimentary. My “Klout Style” page, for example, offers sleek flattery such as: “You don’t just share news, you create the news” and “When you speak, people listen.” Thanks, Klout! How’s my tie look?

Rating: ★ ★ ★

PeerIndex: Assess your online social capital

Where Klout was accessible and easy to decipher, I found PeerIndex a bit baffling. PeerIndex separates itself by measuring how your tweets “resonate” with others. They include ranking on several important-sounding topics, such as “authority,” “activity” and “realness.” Klout said I was influential, but PeerIndex seems to think my influence is limited. After reading through the Scores and Ranking page in the hopes of defining these terms, I came away still mystified about how the topics work and what they mean. On the plus side, if you use this tool at work, you can probably sound impressive in an office meeting by reporting to your boss that the Twitter project is highly authoritative. It might be a strong tool, but when all is said and done, I didn’t dig too deep into the site. However, it has a nice comparison graph that allows you to add and remove other Twitter users.

Rating: ★ ★

Twitalyzer: A subscription-model tool

Twitalyzer operates mainly on a subscription model, but gives away some basic features for free. I’m not in a position to pay $99/month to track my competition or get daily email alerts, so I can’t speak about its full range of offerings. I do feel comfortable saying it may not worth $99/month to spy on Cogsley Cogs’ Twitter statistics and your time would be better spent working on your own page. With a free account, I was able to log in and immediately see my relative percentile (only as ranked among other Twitalyzer users, though) and a map that informed me that most of my views come from New Jersey. It also told me what my Klout and PeerIndex ratings were. This seems like a tool better suited to analyzing your competition than to analyzing yourself.

Rating: ★ ★

TweetStats: Graph your stats!

Tweetstats remains true to its name, as it compiles a bar graph for quick viewing of your monthly stats. Easily see who you @replied to, whom you retweet and what time of day you tweet the most. A useful, basic tool that will offer a helpful overview for any Twitter campaign your nonprofit or business undertakes.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

Crowdbooster: Schedule and analyze

Of all the applications I used, Crowdbooster was my personal favorite. In addition to analyzing your influence and impressions, they also set themselves apart with useful features like the ability to schedule a tweet at the time where it will reach the most amount of followers. They provide actionable recommendations on influential users, offering the option to follow them back from inside their application. I found their charts clear and precise, and their analysis was directly applicable to my Twitter page.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Tweet Grader: Score your profile

Part of a suite of free online marketing tools powered by HubSpot, Tweet Grader is a straightforward tool that measures the power of your Twitter profile. Type in your Twitter handle and Tweet Grader generates a score out of 100 for your overall Twitter profile. You can also use it to find out the scores of other Twitter users and then compare those to your own. In calculating your score, Tweet Grader’s algorithm takes into account the following factors: number and power of followers, follower-to-following ratio, update frequency and most recent, as well as engagement. The site is also handy for seeing top lists, generated by Twitter Grader based on its scoring system. Use it to locate the “Twitter elite,” i.e. Top Users, Top Brands and even Top Women on Twitter.

Rating ★ ★

Tweet Reach: Insight into your tweets

Ever wondered about the value of a tweet? With Tweet Reach, you can get analytics that measure the impact of social media conversations. You can search based on a URL, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag. Tweet Reach then analyzes all the tweets that match your search and generates a report that includes exposure data on those tweets. Extremely useful if your organization uses a specific hashtag often and you want to be able to see how far-reaching the conversation is. The downside is that the free service generates a very basic report, which tells you stats only for the most recent 50 tweets for your search term. For a more detailed report, you can pony up $20 and go into the nitty gritty about your tweets.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

SEMRush: What does your site rank for?

1I’ll bet you a nickel you haven’t heard of SEMrush — and that you’ll find it valuable. Just plunk your blog or website url into the search field atop the page and SEMRush will show the keywords it ranks highest for. For example, I had no idea that my Socialbrite article 4 examples of corporate social responsibility done right is the No. 1 Google search result for “examples of corporate social responsibility” or that our article How to set up an SMS campaign system is the No. 2 Google search result for “sms campaign.” SEMRush will show you what you rank for, what your competitors rank for, what Google AdWords you might consider buying and the terms you should be focusing on in your blog posts.

Woopra: How are your visitors behaving?

2We like what we’ve seen of Woopra, a Web analytics tool that provides real-time data about how users are interacting with your site. While the visitor moves through your site, you can see where she came from, her approximate location, the actions she performs and where she goes off to next. Woopra has a freemium model: While the free version of Woopra is severely limited, you may soon want to move up to the Bronze ($4.95 per month) or Silver edition ($14.95 per month), which let you segment your visitors (say, referrals from Facebook, Twitter or StumbleUpon), print out customized reports and track trends over time. Like SEMRush, Woopra helps you get your own house in order before moving on to your outposts on the social Web.

Klout: Scoring across three networks

3Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque. See the full review of Klout.

Facebook Insights: Stats you can use

4Facebook beefed up its Insights service this year, to good effect. Now Facebook Insights resembles Google Analytics in many ways. As a Page admin, your dashboard gives you access to a trove of data: daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, daily interactions such as comments, geographic location of your visitors (broken down by country, city and language), external referrals, internal link traffic and more. When you have spikes of user engagement, Insights will show you caused them. It’ll show you what content most interests your readers, and it’ll let you and your team understand and analyze growth trends. One big limitation is that you can’t access a lot of the data older than a week.

Bit.ly: Are your promotions working?

5Our favorite url shortener, bit.ly, provides double duty by offering analytics and click data for every link shortened. Click data lets you see how effective your social media promotions are. Just log into your account to see click-through numbers. A new feature, bundles, lets you group similar links together. Both the free version of bit.ly and Bit.ly Pro handle our metrics needs without the need to upgrade to Enterprise ($995 per month).

TubeMogul: Who’s watching your videos?

6If you’re familiar with TubeMogul, you probably think of it simply as a way to upload your videos to multiple sites, saving you the hassle of uploading videos over and over. But TubeMogul has developed a rich set of metrics lately, letting you see stats on how many people have watched your videos across networks. Real-time analytics include views, viewed minutes, audience geography, embeds, referring sites and search terms and more, all via your dashboard. Cross-compare by category, content delivery network, advertising mix or video player. And it’s free.

YouTube Insight: What parts of your video are ‘hot’?

7YouTube Insight is a self-service analytics and reporting tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the audience for the videos that you upload to the site. Use the information to analyze your marketing efforts — both on and off YouTube — and determine how best to optimize your campaigns. Watch the video (natch) and see metrics around views and popularity, how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, which parts of your video are “hot” and “cold,” demographic information and community engagement.

Google Analytics: Powerful & easy to use

8Google Analytics has become such an indispensable part of the analytics landscape that it’s not surprising we get a little blasé about it. But let’s not forget the genius of this tool: You get super-rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness — for free. Create better-targeted ads, track sales and conversions, measure your site engagement goals, track Web-enabled phones and mobile apps, integrate business info and develop applications that access Google Analytics data. By the way, you can also add Google Analytics to your Facebook Page.

Alexa & Compete: How do you stack up?

9When was the last time you looked to see how your site or blog was doing over time? Google Analytics will provide traffic data more accurately than analytics services like Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, but these firms also show trends, a different set of demographics guesswork and, most pointedly, how your site measures up against your competitors’. Alexa offers search analytics showing the top queries driving traffic to your site from search engines. I actually use all three of these services — see which works best for your needs.

Feedburner: Are your feeds radiating out?

10Now owned by Google, Feedburner is the easiest way to roll your own feed — and then sit back and watch the stats roll it. It’ll tell you how many people have subscribed to your blog or site — or even a section of your blog, if you set it up that way. Dig deeper and you’ll find your Feed Stats Dashboard, revealing average subscribers, reach, popular feed items (recently and all time) and other interesting factoids. For instance, we didn’t know Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television was aggregating Socialbrite’s open content via our feeds until we spotted it in Feedburner. Nice!

Twitter tools!: A wealth of options

11There are a ton of third-party Twitter apps to measure your Twitter grandiosity. Here are a few of my favorites:

Twitalyzer works for any Twitter account and gives you information about their impact score (percentile score) and the type of influencer they are.

Grader.com is a suite of tools that helps you measure and analyze your marketing efforts. It shows the bio, location, history and the number of followers of the Twitter user you’re researching, and more.

Twittercounter lets you count registrations and comments on a particular campaign you’re running.

Backtweets shows you how many people you reach on Twitter and helps you understand how people interact with your brand and your content.

Type your Twitter ID into Twitterholic (where you can also see the most popular Twitter users in your city) or Twinfluence or Twittorati to see what kind of impact you’re making.

How far did your tweet travel? tweetreach offers reach metrics, statistics and analysis for marketing and PR professionals. Retweetrank, Tweetmeme, Twitturly and Retweetist also measure how often you get retweeted.

Tweeteffect determines which tweets make you lose or gain followers.

My Tweeple is a basic tool that lets you manage who you’re following and who’s following you.

Twittersheep analyzes your follower profiles to assess their likelihood of engagement.

Plus, a whole lot of other Twitter analytics apps.

PostRank: A modest tracking dashboard

12PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, Diggs and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s suited to blogs and websites with a lot of content. Under its free plan, you can Track and compare your sites and your competition — up to five sites in all — to get the full picture of your social engagement. You can also track your static and offsite content (PDFs, YouTube videos, SlideShare content) for up to 10 sites.

Flickr: Are your pictures trending?

13Flickr was one of the earliest social networks to provide metrics about how many people are viewing your photos. For instance, you’ll be able to see such stats as views for your photos, sets and galleries — today, yesterday and all time (3.4 million for me, how about you?) — your most viewed photos and videos and how many have been geotagged or have comments. I just wish Flickr would tell you how many people are embedding your photos on their sites.

Soovox: For brand lovers

14Soovox has a slightly different take on the Klout model: Discover your Social IQ, share your likes and earn rewards. Your “social influence quotient” measures your online social presence footprint and assigns it a value that gets translated into rewards. The money you make can go to your organization or to your favorite charity. Soovox is more geared to individuals who like to share their opinions about brands and products they love, but it’s worth a look.