#Ask8now – How effective are your #SocialMedia #Marketing efforts?
This is one subject that shouldn’t ever be a guessing game when it comes to finding out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting your #Business online

Measuring Your Social Media Influence – Part 1

How effective are your social media marketing efforts? This is one subject that shouldn’t ever be a guessing game when it comes to finding out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting your business online. Keeping track of what’s going on in the social media world can actually be a reputation-saver when you realize that customers are telling everybody but you about something that went wrong. It’s easier than you might think to find out if you can find the right social analytics tools.

Klout give you a rating from 1-100 based on the effectiveness of social media for driving traffic to your website. It measures engagement on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and gives you a Klout Score based on metrics like the size of your network, the content created and the ways that people interact with the content on social media. Klout has been criticized for its business model and inability to “opt out” of having a profile at Klout if you are connected with anyone who has registered for its services.

Topsy is a certified partner of Twitter who keeps a complete index of tweets going back to 2006. That’s more than one hundred billion tweets. You can use its Pro Analytics and search tools to create interactive analyses of conversations on keywords found on Twitter and Google+. Use it to spot trending keywords and what major influencers are saying about your preferred topic or niche.

PeerIndex has recently been acquired by BrandWatch, so its tools are being integrated into Brandwatch’s platform. These tools are best known for being among the top ways to interactively search Twitter’s author database and provide an advanced way to analyze what influencers are saying about your niche. The old analytics tool PiQ is gone, but the PeerIndex/BrandWatch merger is worth watching for new independent tools for analyzing what people are saying about your niche and your particular business.

The bottom line is that you want to know not just how effective your social media efforts are, but also what people are really saying about your business. This can actually give you a heads-up for when you might need to do some damage control when it comes to your business’ public image or dump an element in your social media marketing that just isn’t working. That means these analytics tools can actually save you time, effort, money, and a fair bit of embarrassment simply by keeping you ahead of the game.