SproutSocial Archives - Socialbrite

3 analytics tools to gauge your social audience

Guest — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:31:07 +0000

Listen, implement & measure to keep up with your users’ needs

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, metrics specialists, educators.

Guest post by Ritu Sharma
Social Media for Nonprofits

Like many of the nonprofits Social Media for Nonprofits works with, we were excited by the recent release of Beth’s new book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

In line with the book’s focus on turning data into knowledge through powerful, insightful measurement and analytics of social media efforts, we wanted to share three simple tips and resources that nonprofits can put to work.

All of these platforms have been profiled at our recent Social Media for Nonprofits conferences, which is about to produce its final U..S program of the year in Seattle on Monday, before we head to New Delhi in December, and then back to New York City, Silicon Valley, Vancouver, plus most other major U.S. markets in 2013.

And now, for those tips and tools:

Get to know your audience

1Want to know what makes your online audience tick? Then check out Simply Measured. In particular, their free reports give you your social audience’s pulse on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and other platforms. There’s a gold mine of intelligence presented in their 8-10 insightful, colorful analysis tools. Learn who your followers are, what issues they care about, which posts are firing up your base, and what types of content are gaining steam and going viral.

Make your website shine

2How can you make your web footprint work for you and complement your social strategy? Nonprofits get free access to Google Analytics, a robust tool that tracks what turns your audience on or off when they land on your site. This tool highlights the behaviors that are most important to understand, including where your audience came from, what content they looked at, how long they stuck around, where you lost them, and to what extent your readers engaged with your content.

Monitor social conversations

3Discover a social treasure of other cause-driven folks like you connecting with like-minded professionals, sharing content, and tracking followers by analyzing your nonprofit’s social media presence. Keep an eye on all your social conversations, wherever they take place, with Sprout Social (think HootSuite on steroids).

Nonprofits can save 50 percent on this low-cost tool, which gives you the ability to engage with your base, strategically search for better followers, identify posts that get superb traction, and of courser, schedule your posts in advance. Note: Pre-scheduling posts should only be used for Twitter and LinkedIn posts, but Facebook de-prioritizes posts scheduled via third party platforms, so that’s a no-no. Thankfully, you can now pre-schedule posts on Facebook directly.

We hope you decide to take advantage of these powerful tools, and that you join us at any of the upcoming Social Media for Nonprofits conferences around the world for more insights, tips, and tools. Come see great speakers like everyone’s favorite, Beth Kanter, plus Guy Kawasaki and senior leaders from leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, plus nonprofit executives from National Geographic, American Red Cross, Greenpeace, Kiva.org, Story of Stuff, DonorsChoose, and charity:water. To ensure broad accessibility, we keep conference registration fees down to about $100, including breakfast, lunch, and access to the full-day program. Scholarships are available for smaller nonprofits.

Ritu Sharma is the co-founder and executive director of Social Media for Nonprofits. She is a public speaker, consultant, and event planner and heads up programming, marketing, and event logistics for the series. Previously, she produced Our Social Times and Influence People’s North American Social Media Marketing and Monitoring conference series and started a Web development and social media business, which leveraged an international team of programmers and designers across India, Romania, and the U.S.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

The post 3 analytics tools to gauge your social audience appeared first on Socialbrite.

How to use Twitter to monitor your brand

Lindsay Oberst — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:55:44 +0000

Monitter is one of the Twitter tracking tools reviewed below.

Tips & tools for tracking what’s being said about your nonprofit

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, brands, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

This is part of our ongoing series on how organizations can get the most out of Twitter. Please see below for other installments in this series.

By Lindsay Oberst
Socialbrite staff

People are talking about your nonprofit, especially on Twitter. Research shows that one out of three Twitter users talk about brands in their tweets. You don’t have the time to moniter your organization’s Twitter stream all day long, hoping to catch any mentions of your name. Thankfully, it’s easy to keep an eye on your brand. You can save time by setting up the right tools for your Twitter account. Below you’ll find plenty of options for monitoring mentions and tracking keywords so that you can respond to supporters promptly and analyze your results for success.

Twilerts: Twitter alerts via email

1Twilerts is a brand application that enables you to receive regular email alerts of tweets containing your brand, or whatever keyword you want to stay on top of. Think Google Alerts for Twitter. It allows you to track up to 10 queries, using its basic or advanced options, after creating a free account through your Twitter account or through Gmail.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

PeopleBrowsr & Kred: Social analytics for serious marketers

2PeopleBrowsr is a Web-based search engine for real-time conversations. The possibility to search bios and tweets by authority, location and links are among its Twitter features. But this is only the beginning, as this tool provides you with plenty of more options to keep track of your brand. It will even analyze tweets and classify them as positive or negative and track sentiments overtime. PeopleBrowser also offers full social analytics solutions with the ability to monitor Facebook, blogs and forums. With pricing beginning at $149 per month per seat, this is clearly an option for power users who really want to go deep with their tracking. Interestingly, the company announced last month that it’s offering a new service called Kred as a competitor to Klout.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

Sideline: Keep on top of key terms

3Sideline is a free monitoring tool from Yahoo! that lets you specify keywords to keep track of via an attractive downloadable app. It runs on Adobe AIR and is open source (though Yahoo! sticks an odd “all rights reserved” notice at the bottom). Sideline has advanced search features, including auto-refreshing of search queries and scanning trending topics. It also offers an Influencers tool to watch what important people are saying about a topic. Watch a four-minute screencast at Vimeo.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop

SocialMention: Social media search & analysis

4SocialMention lets you search keywords on Twitter; however, it also looks for mentions on 100+ social media properties. Place widgets of tracked searches on your website or create daily email alerts for searches. You can only search for one keyword at a time, although you can set up more than one alert. The dashboard, however, goes beyond only searching for your keyword; it also shows you sentiment, top related words, top users and top hashtags.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

Twitter: Lists and advanced search

5Twitter offers several free tools which can help you keep track of what’s being said of your brand. The ability to create Twitter lists can be hugely helpful if you keep them organized. Third-party apps, such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, make viewing lists easier. With the advanced search options, you can monitor negative impressions, questions and tweets by location.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

Monniter: Live Twitter search

6Monniter is a free real-time Twitter search and monitoring tool. It allows you to narrow your search by geolocation, to set up multiple queries and to see them side by side. Plus, you can pause the monitoring of each column. Saved searches aren’t part of its options since you don’t have to sign up to use it. You can, however, place a keyword-tracking widget on your website.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

SocialOomph: Boost your social media productivity

7SocialOomph will monitor the tweet stream for you and periodically email you a list of messages containing your specified keywords. You get a limited number of keywords with the free version, but it’s more than most other free tools allow. The professional version costs $27.97 per month. Socialbrite uses SocialOomph to auto-follow new followers — despite its awful interface.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

SproutSocial: Social media monitoring

8SproutSocial is an elegantly-designed social media dashboard which also allows for keyword tracking. You can aggregate your searches into one data stream to streamline your searches. It also helps you manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other networks. The Pro version is $9 a month, while the Business version is $49 a month. Only the Pro version gives you the option to narrow keyword searches by location. They do, however, offer a 50 percent discount for nonprofits. Email support@sproutsocial.com to request your discount.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

TweetBeep: Twitter alerts

9Tweetbeep lets you track conversations with hourly updates or daily emails. To use this service, you have to sign up and confirm by email. It will also track mentions of your website, even if tweets use a URL shortening service. You can set up 10 keyword alerts for free or upgrade to the Premium version for $20 a month, and get up to 200 alerts with a 15-minute alert option.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

TweetAlarm: Keep an eye on Twitter keywords

10TweetAlarm allows you to track as many keywords as you like and gives you notices whenever you want — daily, weekly or as often as they find tweets that match your query. You can also ignore tweets from users of your choice, including from your own account.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based

Top photo via socialmouths.com

In this series on Socialbrite

• 8 nonprofit Twitter superstars
• 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event
• 24 best practices for nonprofits using Twitter
• 7 top tools to measure performance & influence on Twitter
• Best Twitter dashboards for nonprofits
• 10 great get-down-to-business Twitter apps for nonprofits

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

The post How to use Twitter to monitor your brand appeared first on Socialbrite.