Free Tools for Social Media
(research and measurement)

i’m a consultant at social
media agency nixonmcinnes hello! I’m Beth Granter

NixonMcInnes clients

Why free tools? — Useful
for pitch research, & to validate plans — Good when budgets are low — Good in addition to paid tools

I’m going to talk about
my toolbox — Tools I use for research — Tools I use for measurement — What and how, not so much why

Tools for research — To
find people — To rank influencers — To find conversations, themes — To plan when to act and what to say

Tools for measurement — To
baseline, assess current amount of buzz — To track changes — Specific to platform vs generic

Google’s search filters — Blogs
— Discussions — Length

Google Insights: to check timing
& popularity of terms

Google Insights part 2: to
check folksonomy & regional interest

Google Wonder Wheel: to explore
& represent related searches

Google Ad Planner: to understand
audience behaviours, types of sites visited E.g. Gathering advice from forums and blogs Socialising on Facebook Shopping for food and household items Researching property & holidays Reading news Watching TV programmes Paying bills

Complex searches in Twellow Location
& bio search, & follow directly on the page E.g. search ("united kingdom" | UK) ("football" | "footy”)

Filter by type in Samepoint
<ul><li>Grab RSS feed of results </li></ul><ul><li>At a glance sentiment (questionable reliability?) </li></ul>

Tracking buzz with Samepoint Track
number of results (before, during & after campaign)

Sort delicious links by popularity
Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox

Facebook Insights — Contact acquisition
(total fans) — Engagement (interactions)

Facebook Insights — Audience insights
(demographics)

Socialmention for research Filter, subscribe
to RSS & export CSV

Socialmention for measurement

(if you’re in a hurry)

Popularity vs influence Source: Onalytica

Popularity vs influence

Twitter grader to find influence
path

If you want even more
Twitter metrics…

Firefox plugin for Google PageRank,
Alexa & Compete stats while you browse

<ul><li>Measures social media influence of
an individual or brand, based on: </li></ul><ul><ul><li>Popularity (who you know and the extent of your online network) </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Impact (how much people listen to you online) </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Activity (how active you are online) </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Individuality (how easy you are to find online according to your name etc.) </li></ul></ul><ul><li>Numerical values, e.g. x blog posts in the last month, fed into a vector that partially normalises over the user population, to get a final score. Like Google's PageRank </li></ul>

Google Analytics Advanced Segments

Google Analytics Advanced Segments Use
segments to exclude other ad streams, e.g. banner ads Then look at behaviour e.g. time on site

Baseline & measure with search
engine results

Keeping track of blogger/forum outreach

THE END! http://nixonmcinnes.co.uk http://twitter.com/bethgranter [email_address]

http://technorati.com/ Blog search and ranking
http://blogsearch.google.com/ Blog search http://www.twellow.com/ Twitter directory http://twitter.grader.com/search Twitter user search and ranking http://google.com > Filter results by Discussions http://www.samepoint.com/ Conversation search, buzz http://socialmention.com/ Conversation search, sentiment http://delicious.com/ Social bookmarking – search by popularity *use Greasemonkey plugin to order results https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2007 Google PageRank plugin for Firefox http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ Facebook Ad creator – demographic size Finding your audience and ranking influencers