People ask me all the time how to manage social media. Yes, even people who are social media managers themselves just like me ask. Many think that it has to cost you money. Well, it doesn’t! Here are two of my favorite social media tools that I use for free! Of course, I have tons of tools in my social media tool belt, but this is just a taste…
Are you taking notes?
Crowdbooster: “Measure and optimize your social media marketing”
This is a great service to track your impressions, engagement and growth over time. You can sign up two of your social profiles (like Twitter and Facebook) for free. All of us post a plethora of things to our brand’s social sites. But which ones are resonating the most with our fans? Quickly use Crowdbooster to see which posts are receiving the most amount of RTs, impressions, likes, comments, and replies. This way you can effectively change your posts to fit your community’s taste, and not just shoot blankly into the interwebs.
Don’t know what time to post? Fret no longer. Crowdbooster recommends that for you. The site also shows you when key influencers with high a Klout score follows you. That way you can interact with them on the spot. Crowdbooster also has a killer #FF feature. Personally, I look at who RTed me the most– and then send the #FF out to them with a huge Thank you.
Topsy is another great free service– mainly for tracking your social mentions over time.
Did you just release a product and want to see just how much your reach increased– use Topsy. Have a bug in your app and want to see just how many people mentioned you online – use Topsy. Just make sure to click on their analytics feature. It’s a small image on the right hand side of the screen. Then, you can search for only yourself or yourself compared to two of your competitors. For sh*ts and giggles, I searched just myself. Today, I did an awesome tweet chat, and my social mentions went from their normal 50/day to 80 for the day. 
You can also see your top tweet as per its traction. Just click on the top peak of each day to view it in Topsy’s Analytics.
On the main website (out of the analytics page) you can also look at the RTs for each tweet about your search term.
Wanna know more about the person who tweeted you? Just click on their avatar and/or handle. How cool is that?
It does have some limitations though. It tracks mainly tweets– Facebook and blog posts are not calculated. It also doesn’t show sentiment, gender, or list the tweets by anything other than the time they were tweeted. That being said, it’s a great tool to freely track your mentions and your competitors.
Hope these two tools help increase your awesome social media powers.
-Amy
Amy W Higgins 