Tips and Ideas for your Design World

You have all been there. You’ve set up all of your social networking accounts, your Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarking sites, blog, etc., etc. You think that you are doing everything right. You are constantly helping others, tweeting and blogging. But, the big question is how do you track who is interacting, clicking and responding?
One of the most important things to do while in the social marketing lions den is to track your results. You want to see who is coming to your site, how they got there and what motivated them to do so. By tracking this you will be able to become a better communicator, blogger and hopefully convert some of those number into sales. To make things a little easier, I have come across a great blog post from, http://simmentors.com that created a list of monitoring tools on this amazing blog that will make you blog faster than an @ChrisBrogan bullit, be more powerful than @Problogger and leap the size of your following better than @Mashable. (Well, not likely, but these will definitely help). Below are a list of must-have monitoring tools to get you started in social media/website monitoring (There are many more though).

1. Social Mention: http://www.socialmention.com
What it does: Social Mention is a free tool which provides email updates of the latest relevant results (web, news, tweets,etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. All you do is enter a search term, determining the type of search results to be tracked (news, blogs, web, video, etc.), selecting update frequency and entering an email address. Social Mention is a great way to monitor brand mentions for both company and product names. Plus, the tool can be leveraged to monitor competitor mentions. It is similar to Google Analytics but, goes a step further and provides a ranking score for popularity and is primarily focused on all social media.

2. Hootsuite: http://www.hootsuite.com
What it does: Allows you to manage profiles, track stats and create lists for Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Ping. This all in one client lets you schedule messages and interact in real time so that you don’t have to spread yourself thin. But, the reason that Hootsuite is on the list is because of their cool statistics and ease of use. With hootsuite you can track retweeted messages, most popular posts (by clicks) and which regions of the world you have attracted people from.

3. Twitalzer: http://twitalyzer.com
What it does: Twitalyzer is an awesome tool for Twitter users. All you have to do is enter in your Twitter name and shazam, all the information from followers to clout (the likely hood your name will reach another Twitter user) are presented in a nice user friendly format. Also, have you ever wanted to know how some elses Twitter profile is rated compared to yours? Just type it in to find out.

4. goingup: http://www.goingup.com
What it does: Goingup is an AJAX-rich interface that combines pwerful web-analytics with amazing top notch SEO tools. Goingup is probably one of the best all-in-one tools available for checking page rank, checking website backlinks, showing popular keywords on your website, site analyzer and much, much more.

5.  Woopra: http://www.woopra.com
What is does: Woopra is similar to Goingup, but offers realtime analytics for your website. There is a free and paid version depending on needs and you can even track multiple blogs, complete user data and amazing real time chat so that you can engage people right as they are posting on your blog.

6. Facebook Insights: http://www.facebook.com/help/?search=insights Located on left side of your Facebook fanpage when logged in as an administrator.
What is does: Facebook Insights measures user exposure, actions, and behavior relating to your Social Ads and Facebook Page. This is not the best of analytic tools but, since this is the only one that I know of…it will have to do since Facebook should be an important part of your social marketing campaign.

There are a few more that deserve mention (but, not focus).
Google analytics : Really good tool for website analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics
Cloud monitor: Allows you to track mentions across many social media networks. http://www.rightnow.com/cx-suite-cloud-monitoring.php
Mint: For $30 it will show you where the most interest is being generated and why. http://www.haveamint.com