A Look At 5 Free Twitter Measurement Tools

Twitter can be a great promotional tool for a musician, artist, band, engineer or songwriter, but it doesn't do you much good unless you can measure how well you're doing. Most social media analysts are paying less attention to followers and more to social interaction. Luckily there are a number of tools that allow you to determine just what your reach is. Here's an excerpt from Social Media Promotion For Musicians that looks at 5 free Twitter measurement tools.

"As with everything online, it’s possible to measure how well you’re doing on Twitter, although the measurement details can sometimes raise some eyebrows because of the differences between measurement tools. That’s why it’s best to look at the trends more than any actual scores that the following services provide. If you see a metric suddenly jump up or down, you want to know why. Likewise, if you see something trending up or down month over month, then it’s time for some real analysis. Here are a few measurement services to check out.

• Klout: Klout gives you a score based upon the total action from your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Instagram and Linkedin accounts. You’re able to see the approximate number of mentions, retweets, followers and lists you receive, as well as a 90 day history.

• Topsy: Topsy is another measurement tool that has some free elements, but for anything granular it will cost you. It’s great for searching trends, hashtags, and just about any other social detail, and the Pro version can give you exact counts of mentions, sentiments, impact and trends.

• Trackur: Trackur is another tool that provides social influence and sentiment analysis for a price. It looks at all social platforms, not just Twitter.

• Kred: Kred is pretty cool in that it looks at your entire social community and scores you on your influence. It gives you a 30 day follower count, shows influence and outreach, and shows your top locations and communities, among other things. You can also look at the Kred scores of others globally, check out the scores for books, movies and TV shows, and see what your friends are scoring. It’s free for now.

• Tweetstats analyzes your tweets over time and is a good way to look at your personal stats in a nice graph.

None of these tools are perfect so it's best that you use a couple to get a feel for your current Twitter presence."

To read additional excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and other books, go to the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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Cutting-Edge Social Media Measurement Tools

Social media measurement tools have reached a new level of sophistication beyond what many ever conceived would happen. While not a total panacea, these new tools are just another part of what's required to understand where you stand in todays social media strata. Here's an excerpt from Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age that covers some of these next-level services.
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"As social media becomes more sophisticated, so does the measurement tool requirements to determine both your impact and branding possibilities. Three new methods of analyzing social media data have shown a lot of promise, but it might be a bit too early in the learning curve to completely trust the data. Still, it's good to know about what's on the horizon.

• Sentiment analysis is a process that tries to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to the topic they're writing about. If you actually read a blog or posting, you can tell the writer's sentiment immediately, but this analysis method tries to define and measure it as points of data.

• Cluster analysis tries to analyze how certain words are gathering (or “clustering”) relative to a search topic. It finds the words that are mostly likely to be associated with your search word, which may provide unexpected insight into what’s being said about you and even predict sales before they happen.

• Semantic analysis is another measurement tool that strives to understand what words mean in context to one another. Once again, it's something that we do for ourselves as we read, but this tool puts a number to it.

All of these tools are trying to measure what we can immediately see for ourselves empirically by just wading into the social media pool. They put a number to something that we can feel.

New measurement platforms like Sysomos and Radian6 are said to be using these tools to provide a more precise look at how you or your brand integrates with the social world.

If you need data for a meeting, to sway an investor, or appease a boss, these tools are important. If you're a marketer on a very high level, you might find the data immediately useful. If you're a band or artist just trying to make the next sale, the next gig, or make it through the next day of social media management, you'll find them interesting as best and parlor tricks at worst. But while these tools may be cutting edge today, you never know if they'll be an essential part of your marketing toolbox tomorrow. Stay tuned."

To read additional excerpts from Music 3.0 and my other books, go to bobbyowsinski.com.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Measuring Your Social Media Exposure

It's all well and great to be active online, but simply having a lot of likes, followers and friends isn't always the true gauge of your presence. That's why it's important to be able to more closely measure your true social media exposure. Luckily, there are now multiple ways to do this, as evidenced in this excerpt from the 2nd edition of the Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age. This excerpt comes from Chapter 8 on "Social Media Management."

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"How many people have you reached with your message? How many could you have reached? In social media, there are some measurements about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this book, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

• Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.

• Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach. Facebook Insights provides value here.

• YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.

• Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.

• Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

Social Media Measurement Tools
Measuring just how successful an artist’s promotional campaign is (the artist’s buzz) and all the data that surrounds an artist is a top issue for M3.0. This was impossible in M1.0 and 1.5, somewhat available in M2.0, but now much more widely available and easier than ever to use in M3.0. With so many new avenues available for music discovery and promotion, knowing where the buzz is coming from and how to utilize it is more an issue than ever.

Here are nine tools to help track your buzz:

Band Metrics (bandmetrics.com) - band and song tracking
Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) - Sweeps the web and delivers buzz to your inbox.
Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) - Track your buzz on this popular micro-blogging service.
Who’s Talkin (whostalkin.com) - Social media search.
Stat Counter (statcounter.com) - statistics about who visits your site and blog
Tynt Tracer (tcr1.tynt.com) - traces images and text that’s been copied off your site.
Next Big Sound (nextbigsound.com) - shows the number of new fans, plays, views and comments
Music Metric (musicmetric.com) - provides social network tracking, P2P network analysis, radio and sales data, and fan demographics.
RockDex (rockdex.com) - collects data from blog posts, fan connections, pageviews, tweets, song plays, and spots viral trends and tracks progress over time."

You can read more excerpts from Music 3.0 and my other books on my website.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.