Social Media Assignment: Free Metric and Measurement Tools

I spent part of my break revamping my assignments for my Online Media class including trying to bring clarity to my social media assignment. I structured the assignment so it would be useful for my students and the audience at a PR Newswire event as well. In addition, Kaye Sweetser recently shared her social media monitoring assignment.

Step 1 – Identify your goals

1. Think about whether reach, reputation or engagement is your goal. Write down specific objectives related to your social media efforts. For example, a goal could be to get more social media mentions of your blog, find sources, increase readership, build reputation, find new story angles, etc. Goals encourage you to be efficient and focused with your social media efforts. Goals will change or expand over time. Understand that each social media application serves different functions dependent upon community members.
2. Be tuned into your online presence. Google your name, company, etc. in quotes “Jane Doe” and screen capture a .jpg of your Google results. Screen-capture your web presence by pressing command+shift+4 (Mac) to create .jpg of a section. You can capture multiple sections of your results. You can also use Super Screenshot! or PDFmyurl to capture entire page. You will capture the results again when you hand in the social media assignment.
3. Set up Google alerts for your name (e.g., “Serena Carpenter”; “Carpenter, Serena”), company name, employees, etc. PR Sarah Evans suggested other useful tools to monitor your online presence not required for this assignment: 1) use BlogPulse Conversation Tracker feed to monitor blog comments, 2) track mentions in video with Google, 3) monitor discussions with BoardTracker, 4) and view your reputation with Quarkbase.

Step 2 – Establish your credibility

1. Complete your bio on numerous sites. This includes the same picture, credentials, and URLs on every site. Hand in the your URLs on the due date. Sites can include LinkedIn, BrightFuse, Twitter, Flickr, MediaGeeks, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Profile, SlideShare, Delicious, FriendFeed, FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Favstar, OpenSalon, NewsVine, Twtjobs, etc. FB, YouTube and Twitter are the top three (right now).
2. Find influentials. There are several ways to find thought leaders such as Twitter’s Suggested Users, Alltop, Listorious, PostRank Topics, Technorati, Google Blog Search, and blogrolls.
3. Listen. Each topic and application has its own culture. You must observe before participating.
4. Share useful information before seeking friends or contacts. People will evaluate you based on your content and bio. You must participate regularly and thoughtfully. People like frequent and shorter form content.
5. Interact with others users, ask them to share their stories, submit photos, design and create videos, logos, etc., ask and answer questions, acknowledge other members contributions to the group, and comment on other blogs. Focus on becoming part of the read-write web.

Step 3 – Set up FREE metric tools. (Top three most important for this class.)

1. Bit.ly (Monitor link traffic). Shorten your links in bit.ly to track clicks and how your links are shared. Provide the top 10 links clicked on including the number of clicks.
2. TweetStats. Provide your average tweets per day.
3. Sitemeter (Traffic analyzer). Track your blog site traffic. Useful site to see the location of users and see how users found your site including keywords. Select previous 12 months and provide the visits and page views for each month.
4. Google Analytics (Traffic analyzer). On the Dashboard, select a date range for each month. Provide the visit number for each month. On the Traffic Sources Overview, please the three top keyword search terms used to find your site. Most users use 1-3 terms.
5. YouTube Insight (Traffic analyzer). Tracks how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, etc. for your Web site.
6. Feedburner (Subscribers). Provide the number of people who subscribe to your blog via RSS.
7. FriendFeed (Subscribers). Subscribe to multiple feeds related to one individual. Provide the number of subscribers.
8. Twitter Lists (Subscribers). Create a list that is of informational value to Twitter users and provide the number of subscribers.
9. Google Alerts and Tweet Beep (Monitor brand and conversations). Set up an alert for your name, company, or blog in quotes.
10. SocialMention (Monitor brand and conversations). Tracks mentions related to your name. Enter your Twitter id and/or name in quotes. Select to search “all.” Provide your strength, sentiment, passion, and reach numbers.
11. Addictomatic (Monitor brand and online mentions). Look up your twitter id and full name in quotes. Useful tool that monitors your presence across search engines and information aggregators TweetMeme shows who is referencing you on Twitter. Provide the top three referrals.

Step 4 – Measure your efforts

In the following tables, record your numbers. Numbers are only one measure of influence. It is also important to see track whether mentions are positive and negative. This can be referred to as sentiment analysis or opinion mining. You could also do a thematic qualitative analysis based on comments related to your company, however this is not required for this class. Under themes such as negative, positive, satisfaction, useful, place comments under each heading to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Step 5 – Identify trends and readjust social media efforts

Monitor the cultures by participating. Where do you best fit in? Which applications do you most enjoy? Which applications serve your goals best? Is traffic up after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Where are your customers online? Think about how much time you put into connecting and how often you are mentioned within each culture.

Reflection Paper

Write a double-spaced four-page paper on lessons learned. I do not want you to simply list what you did, rather focus on what you have learned related to online communication and relationship building. Think about how this knowledge influences how you will create content in the future? How will social media influence your field? How will this knowledge influence your future? Why is relationship building important? How is online content different than offline? What were your perceptions before and after this assignment? What will you keep up following this assignment and why?

These items are not included in the four pages.

1. List of URLs
2. Tables
3. Before and after screen grabs

The key component that you will be graded on is your continual participation throughout the two months. Do not begin participating a week before the assignment is due.

ROI Table Examples

One Response to “Social Media Assignment: Free Metric and Measurement Tools”

1. 3 Tips To Measure Social Media Efforts | SocialWants on June 28th, 2010 10:50 am

   [...] and metrics. You can also create a listening system with many of the free metric tools as seen from this article. You also want to make sure that you are recording your numbers so that you can compare results [...]

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