What is the best tool to measure the success of your Social media campaigns?

Dear Haitham,

There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about your engagement efforts. I will tell you the Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytics, and Management

Determining which tools are right for you requires a clear definition of your objectives. Some are real-time, highly customized dashboards that enable you to manage multiple accounts, use shared work spaces, and respond on multiple social networks with one click. Others are simple, effective, and lightweight, and provide the right amount of functionality.

1. Alterian/SDL ($) | Alterian is now SDL, an integrated platform that blends the marketing analytics, campaign management, and social media capabilities from Alterian with those of SDL.
2. Argyle Social ($) | Identify and engage with more prospects, qualify and quantify better leads, and build and maintain stronger relationships by linking social media actions to the marketing platforms you’re already using.
3. BackTweets (Free) | Track how many people are talking about you, who’s talking, and what they’re saying. You can search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via Twitter, including results for full URL links, shortened URLs, and URLs without the “www” prefix.
4. BlitzMetrics ($) | Social media dashboards for your brand that monitor content across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and more. It helps you benchmark against your competitors, learn which demographics are the most active, and track content performance so you can improve your reach and engagement.
5. Bottlenose ($) | A tool that provides live social intelligence by analyzing activity across all the major social networks. Use it to search, monitor, analyze, target, and engage in real time, all from one place.
6. Brandwatch ($) |This service reads through and summarizes what’s being said on the Web about brands, people, and products. Define keywords to track (brands, topics, people names, products) and get access to mentions,  trend and campaign analysis, and competitive info.
7. Buffer (Free and $) | An app that manages multiple Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, with the ability to set a tweeting or updating schedule unique to each. Includes detailed analytics for all your posts.
8. Buzz Equity ($) | Listen to social media conversations in real time from various social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news, forums, reviews, and video websites.
9. CARMA ($) | Evaluate your overall social media image, brand recognition, message penetration, competitive positioning, and areas of strength and weakness, and use the data to develop a strategically sound and effective communication strategy.
10. Collective Intellect ($) | This Oracle platform captures millions of conversations a day across multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. It extracts sentiments, preferences, and intentions from those sources and displays the information in real time.
11. Crimson Hexagon ($) | Tap into social media conversations with listening tools that help you understand how the most engaged consumers think and feel about your brand, why consumers are choosing other brands over yours, and how your ads/marketing are really perceived by your audience.
12. Curalate ($) | This tool applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give you detailed insights for your initiatives on Instagram and Pinterest.
13. CustomScoop ($) | Track media coverage, listen to social conversations, monitor your competition, measure PR and marketing effectiveness, and get automated daily reports.
14. CyberAlert ($) | Monitor100,000+ consumer-generated media sites for word of mouth, including Twitter, blogs, Usenet (there’s a blast from the past :), and video sites.
15. Facebook Insights (Free) | Facebook’s built-in tool provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their content. Helps you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics.
16. Fliptop ($) | A customer intelligence platform that uses publicly available information, including social data, to score leads so you can prioritize your pipeline, better target your audience, and know more about your customers.
17. Google Alerts (Free) | Get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your queries.
18. Gorkana ($) | This tool searches through and filters conversations to provides insights into the most relevant conversations about your brand. Offers audits and reports plus daily social media alerts.
19. HootSuite (Free and $) | A social media management system that enables teams to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one dashboard. Includes audience identification tools, the ability to streamline workflow, and custom reports. I use HootSuite to manage my company’s Twitter account.
20. Icerocket (Free) | A free resource for brand monitoring, it taps the Web, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, and delivers easy-to-read results in one page.
21. Klout (Free) | A tool that finds the influencers in your audience so you can target and empower them to become advocates for your brand.
22. MarketMeSuite ($) | A dashboard similar to Hootsuite and TweetDeck, it can be used to manage and market on multiple social profiles, schedule messages, use geotargeting, and more.
23. MediaMiser ($) | Web app that collects and analyzes relevant content about your brand from social, traditional, and digital media. Spots trends in media coverage, including sentiment, share of voice, and top regions.
24. MediaVantage ($) | Pulls traditional media coverage and social media mentions into a database that helps you monitor your reputation, align your teams and messaging, and measure results.
25. Meltwater ($) | Combines social media monitoring and analytics with social engagement tools to help you create targeted marketing campaigns and build  brand relationships.
26. Mention (Free to $) | An iPhone and Android app that lets you create alerts for your company, its keywords, your brand, and your competitors. Updates in real time.
27. NetBase ($)| A social intelligence platform that enables you to monitor, understand, react, engage, and publish through both owned and earned channels.
28. Netvibes (Free and $) | A platform that tracks clients, customers, competitors, and your reputation across media sources, analyzes live results with3rd party reporting tools, and provides media monitoring dashboards for brand clients.
29. NUVI ($) | Real-time display of conversations that weight influence and sentiment. You can instantly see the social media conversations taking place in your market and immediately engage your detractors and evangelists.
30. Pinpuff (Free) | Similar to Klout but focusing only on the Pinterest, it measures the how people share images about your brand and the influence that results.
31. PinReach ($) | Measures your Pinterest influence by giving you an overall score and easy-to-read charts and tables that show your most popular pins and boards.
32. Pinterest Web Analytics (Free) | Pinterest’s built-in analytics gives site owners insights into how people are interacting with pins that originate from their websites. See my in-depth post: Use Pinterest Web Analytics to Jumpstart Your Social Media Marketing.
33. Plugg.io (Free) | Manage and tweet from multiple accounts, get friend suggestions, and automate syndication via blogs and news sources.
34. Shoutlet ($) | A community management and moderation platform for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and YouTube. Includes integrated workflow tools and task assignments.
35. Social Marketing Cloud ($) | An automated solution that enables you to monitor and analyze blogs, forums, wikis, and microblogging sites to track real-time conversations about your brand.
36. Social Mention (Free) | A real-time social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google,  etc. into a single stream.
37. Social Response ($) | Formerly Cotweet. Build dynamic Facebook fan pages, respond in real time on Twitter and Facebook, and communicate1-to-1 with your followers.
38. Sprout Social ($) | Web app that monitors Twitter, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Gowalla, and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands.  Also offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, and analytics.
39. SWIX Analytics ($) | This tool tracks75 social media metrics in one dashboard, enabling you to measure your social media influence.
40. Synthesio ($) | Platform that offers global, multilingual monitoring of your brand’s reputation, campaign management, influencer tracking, and competitive intelligence. Well-suited for large enterprises.
41. Sysomos ($) | A real-time monitoring dashboard that collects relevant online conversations about your brand and provides insights with detailed metrics and graphics.
42. Talkwalker ($) | This reporting tool constantly scans the Web and social media to monitor your brand, reputation,  and competitors. It can also be used for campaign tracking, market research, and customer service.
43. Topsy ($) | Monitors tweets, websites, blogs, and social networks, and analyzes/indexes/ranks content and trends.
44. Trackur ($) | Quickly monitor your online reputation, measure social media trends, and analyze social media mentions for your company, brands, or clients.
45. TweetBeep (Free and $) | This app is like Google Alerts for Twitter: Choose some keywords and receive daily search results via email.
46. TweetDeck (Free) | Very similar to HootSuite, only without all the bells and whistles, this client enables you to tweet and track mentions, people, and keywords.
47. Twitalyzer ($) | One-click access to Twitter metrics that analyze followers, mentions, retweets, and influencers and their locations. It can also be used to compare your Twitter account to those of your competitors.
48. UberVU ($) | Keeps track of all the major social media platforms in real time and delivers opportunities for audience engagement.
49. Visible ($) | A social media analytics and engagement dashboard that enables you to monitor, analyze, and engage in social media conversations all in one place. It can also be integrated into your existing CRM system.
50. Vocus ($) | Cloud marketing and analytics platform that looks at social, search, email, and PR, and delivers real-time marketing opportunities in the form of leads, prospects, social media conversations, curated content and inbound media inquiries.

Best Regards,

 Hany Sewilam Abdel Hamid

Business Development Manager

Entrepreneurship Coach & Consultant              

- http://www.sewilam.com

- facebook.com /Orkanza

- twitter.com /HanySewilam

That is a fantastic responce to my question, thank you so much Hersh. This information is great and will help me improve the social media marketing campaigns 

A great question, indeed! A lot of companies who want to approach Social Media as a means to market themselves better want to know the answer to this very question. And it might be something that disappoints those who are looking for a direct tool or result that tells them that investing 'X' amount of money will provide them with 'Y' amount of return, while assuring them that any campaign will be successful to run.

There are many site tools that measure the effectiveness of Social Media Campaigns in terms of sheer numbers. However, just getting Likes and Retweets should not be the objective of any campaign as it is the most myopic and amateur approach anybody can take to conducting themselves across Social Media.

For Facebook, the site analytics are an excellent way to gauge reach. Increased interactions on the brand page, better audience responses and an overall growth in awareness, and subsequently, higher sales will showcase the success of a Facebook campaign. This can also take another route, when a customer who is on your brand page becomes more aware of the products/services and uses Google to search for more information. This can then potentially lead to a direct sale or sale through an e-commerce medium. Although this is not something you can directly track, viewing it in isolation as 'Social Media Marketing -> Awareness -> Brand Building -> Sale' can give you a fair view of how to track the success of a campaign.

For Twitter as for Google+, the site analytics offer insights into increase in numbers on a timescale.

Running ads and then adding the numbers from analytics can give you a brief insight on increase in interactions, but this is not success. The success of a campaign comes from the boost and awareness that the brand receives, increased positive conversations about the brand on social media and personal communication, and the relative increase in brand value and sales that is generated. The only way to measure this success is in terms of customer satisfaction and long term growth, because Social Media is not about instant gratification for the company (although quite a few members of a page are looking at just that). It is about a steady build-up and a sensible extension to their mainstream marketing capabilities.