5 Social Media Analytics Tools to Check Out

How do you know if your social media tactics are working? Are you getting more traffic on Twitter or Facebook? At what times? From who?

Having all these questions answered can help you tailor your approach to respond best to the needs of our business and your clientele. You can then apply what youve learned to target your social tactics online--and with the tools listed below, you can do all this with the same software.

Radian6

This company offers a wide range of price points for social media listening.

You can pay $600 per month for one topic and the first 10,000 content returns, all the way up to $4,000 per month for 200,000 results on six topics.

You also get Google Analytics, Webtrends, and Omniture with the advanced package. You can also integrate with salesforce.com and get sentiment analysis through Insights.

Radian6 has training videos, webinars, and full support.

The analysis dashboard brings you results from over 100 million social media outlets across the web, and you see all your mentions in one place. With the engagement console you can see how your team is responding to mentions and inquiries--and they can share information between departments with ease. For quick info, the summary dashboard and mobile versions give you the main points.

Customers of Radian6 include H&R Block, Pepsi, and the American Red Cross.

Spredfast

Along with the essentials standard to the social media tools on this list, Spredfast also offers error handling (so that none of your work is lost due to site outages), the ability to schedule content for review before publication (to ensure accuracy and quality in all of your content), a White Label option for comprehensive branding, Top 10 lists covering several different angles of exposure, and more.

It offers the standard integrations with Google Analytics, Omniture, and salesforce.com, mobile features, and the ability to put what youve learned into practice by managing your own content publication and promotion between all your departments.

Pricing is flexible, so youll need to contact them to discuss your needs and the different available options that work best for your company.

Nokia, AARP, and Bayer all use Spredfast for their social analytics.

Simply Measured

Simply Measured has thorough coverage for your social media monitoring and analytics needs.

You can track specific keywords, hash tags, links or phrases, mentions in videos, the locations of people engaging with your social media tools, and more.

They report via Excel, so all the data you get back is organized and simplified. With their Facebook analytics, you can track fan pages and search for keywords in the comments. Watch your growth on Twitter, right down to individual Tweets. You can combine multiple accounts into one report for easy analysis, and check out how your brand is faring against your competitors.

Plans start at $500 a month, but you can ask for a free trial.

Customers of Simply Measured include Levis, Alaska Airlines, Edelman and Vayner Media.

Crimson Hexagon

Crimson Hexagon boasts being the only social media dashboard to [let] you distill meaning - with mathematical precision - from the sea of opinion, information and data available in social media.

Sentiment analysis is standard across all the dashboards discussed here, but CH reports their analytics discern the patterns and intent of content with a 97% rate of accuracy. It can also calculate your return on investment (ROI) from any marketing and promotional campaigns you launch.

The pricing is completely flexible, so youll need to contact a customer service rep to discuss your options.

Companies like CNN, A&E, monster.com, Johnson & Johnson and The Huffington Post rely on Crimson Hexagon for their social networking analytics needs.

Sysomos

Drawing from more than 8 million posts per hour in a variety of languages worldwide, Sysomos aims to give you a detailed and globally thorough analysis of your social media reach.

Its dashboard lets you watch as many Facebook pages as you need, interact with Twitter, format exportable data in a variety of ways, and avoid wasting time with spam messages.

Sysomoss sentiment analysis is automatic, and they provide detailed focus on the demographics that are talking most about you--who and where they are, what theyre saying, how theyre saying it. They also employ Boolean search tactics to ensure that search results are completely relevant to you. We all know that words like AND, OR, and NOT can make all the difference in search engines.

As with many of these dashboards, pricing is available on a case-by-case basis.

Sysomos serves companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonalds and the BBC.