Do You Know Your Reach On Social Media Or Are You Out Of Touch With Reality?

Today’s guest post is from Natalie Sisson, The Suitcase Entrepreneur and one of my senior associates at Cross Border Communications. She has spent years testing and investigating tools to help her run her business from anywhere in the world. Here, Natalie shares some of the best tools for managing and tracking your social media involvement.

How often do you actually get behind the scenes of all your social media activity to see if it’s really working? Do you know how to understand your influence, reach and engagement, or are too busy retweeting?

It’s all too easy to get caught up tweeting or posting status updates to Facebook, publishing blog posts and connecting on LinkedIn — without really knowing whether any of this is bringing you more business or exposure.

If you’re looking to build truly valuable relationships and turn them into potential joint ventures, future customers or clients then it’s essential to track and analyze what you do in social media.

Seems like too much work? Not if you use the right tools to streamline your efforts, manage multiple social media profiles and mine your activities for rich data and insight.

The good news is, many of these tools are free, help you to integrate your efforts, and save you time and money.

Let’s take a look at a few below.

Some Really Useful Social Media Tools

PostRank

If you haven’t heard of PostRank™ then you better listen up. This handy tool gathers where and when your online content generates comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interactions from over 20 social networks and hubs.

PostRank helps you view the analytics on your content and measure the influence and authority of your stories and sites.

PostRank™ Analytics provides the missing link between social media engagement and web
analytics. You get a handy email each day showing how your content is being received and figuring out what’s working best for you and attracting the most attention.

Hootsuite

If you have multiple Twitter accounts and need to post to them all at once, but prefer to post to Facebook and LinkedIn separately, then this is your new best friend.

Hootsuite is a social media dashboard for people who want to make the most of the time they spend engaging in social media, while minimizing the time spent managing their accounts. You can set up simple tabs and columns to manage your accounts. For example, set up a tab called “Social Media,” then add multiple columns to track key Twitter accounts specific to you.

Other tabs could be “Top bloggers,” “Key influencers,” “PR Specialists,” and “Publishers.” This way, you don’t get distracted following everybody, you just see updates for those people in that list, or that you’ve added to that column.

You can easily track people who are retweeting you, keywords for your business and brand, mentions, direct messages, and analytics. So you can get right down to which of your tweets was most popular by click rate, who retweeted it, and where in the world they were. Best of all it’s free to use most of these features.

KISS Metrics

Want to find out what people do when they visit your website, what actions they take and at which part of the sales funnel they opt out? Then consider using KISSmetrics.

You’ve likely seen it at the bottom of people’s websites, popping up to ask you a question specific to that website (in a non-invasive but highly effective way).

Unlike other analytics packages, KISSmetrics measures people, not page views. The tool doesn’t rely on cookies alone, but consolidates all of a customer’s behaviors whether they’re browsing on their home laptop, their work desktop, or their iPod.

It gives you a complete visual picture of your customer life cycle. It’s worth the monthly fee if you want to ensure you’re gaining customers and not losing sales.

These are just some of the tools I recommend to make your life much more worthwhile on social media. For the complete guide check out the Ultimate Toolkit for Evolutionary Entrepreneurs.

This handy small business bible demystifies all the tools available out there and cuts it down to the best of the best, with just one FREE and one paid tool to choose from across different key areas of business.

If you need to manage your social media needs, discover tools to be a professional marketer, ensure you’re servicing your customers, manage and collaborate with a virtual team or just be more productive, this toolkit is your one stop shop.

Check it out here.

Your Turn

What are your favorite social media management and monitoring tools? Share them in the comments below, so we can learn from each other.

Also, if you liked this post, then please “like” it on Facebook, or retweet it. Thank you!

---

Natalie Sisson is a Suitcase Entrepreneur and adventurer who travels the world running her business from anywhere while literally living out of a suitcase. As a former co-founder of a technology startup, Natalie loves demystifying tools and cutting through the technical jargon to show others how to find and use the right tools to streamline your business and save time and money. At Cross Border Communications, Natalie helps clients with their social media strategy.