Every day, people are posting 500 million tweets, 55 million Facebook updates, 5 million pins on Pinterest, 60 million pictures on Instagram, and 114 million posts on Tumblr. How’s a business supposed to cut through all that social media noise to make an impact? And how do you know whether you’re actually reaching your target audience?

Many social media sites offer businesses tools to help you monitor your success – Are you taking advantage of them? Here’s a recap of the tools you can use to ensure your social media efforts are working:

Instagram Business Tools

Instagram recently rolled out a new suite of tools and real-time campaign data to help you understand how your content performs on the social network. The image-based social media site offers information on impressions, reach and frequency to help you evaluate engagement with your audience. With this information you’ll have the knowledge of what kinds of images are resonating with your followers so you can share more content like it in the future.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter also has an updated analytic dashboard for marketers, verified users and Twitter Card publishers. The dashboard shows the number of impressions, favorites and retweets for each tweet as well as how many times a site visitor has clicked on the tweeter’s profile. The tweet metrics are updated in real time. A CSV export tool will show data for up to 3,200 tweets and includes a breakdown of all tweet impressions. The new tool set allows you to identify in real time which tweets are attracting the most engagement with audiences so you can better determine which Twitter strategies are most effective.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights identifies page visits, likes, comments and shares. It also allows you to identify unlikes and hidden posts. We have a Definitive Guide to Using Facebook Insights for Your Business to maximize all those stats.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster combines analytics and recommendations to create a guide for social media optimization. The web-based application helps you understand how you’re performing on various social media networks, and how you can increase online influence and better connect with customers.

Recommendations allow you to schedule tweets or posts at the best time and to create more relevant content based on the performance of past content. You can also use the platform to respond to missed tweets and to cross post between social networks. Crowdbooster currently offers services to measure Twitter and Facebook use. Analytics measure impressions, retweets, clicks, mentions, replies, likes and comments. Crowdbooster can help businesses track follower and fan growth over time and identify key influencers or frequent commenter.

Hootsuite Analytics/UberVu

Like Crowdbooster, Hootsuite combines analytics with social media optimization recommendations. Hootsuite offers a mobile app so you can analyze your social media reach from practically anywhere. Pricing starts at $9.99 per month.

In January, Hootsuite expanded its analytical offerings with the acquisition of UberVu. The UberVu tools allows you to see where your social profiles are growing and to monitor spikes in brand sentiment (based on social media posts). You can measure clicks, likes, retweets and other behavior to determine what content resonates best with your audience. UberVu also notifies you of spikes around keywords you’ve identified to help you respond quickly and effectively when a topic is trending. You can identify key influencers or customers as they’re engaging in conversations about your company or product and communicate directly with them.

Viralheat

Viralheat analyzes more than 600 data points to provide information on social media trends across the web, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, videos, blogs and websites. Viralheat offers engagement and influencer scoring, tracks relevant key words and filters results by channels (Facebook, the web, etc.)

The company also offers sentimental trend reporting so you know how particular issues are being received by your target audience. You can identify high activity times, track competition response times, and filter mentions and trends by geographic region. Viralheat allows you to identify trends for your brand and that of your competition and to filter them based on sentiment.

How do you track your social media success? Do you use third party tools, or simply what’s available on each social site? Let us know in the comment section below.

Written by By Tonya McMurray, a freelance writer with more than 25 years of experience. Her work includes news and feature articles for publications and websites in a variety of industries, including energy, education, marketing, healthcare and technology.

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