Measuring social media is one of the areas of online marketing that is still frequently discussed and we still haven’t found that magic number yet! But there are lots of free tools that can help to monitor and track your social media activity to ensure it’s working for you or you’re reaching your targets

Facebook Insights – Facebook provide you with a comprehensive analytics suite for pages that allows you to get a full insight into your fans and how they’re interacting on the page. Facebook Insights is split into 2 main sections : users and insights.

Users gives you all the basic information you need on your fans, including active users, the number of unlikes on your page, as well as information on traffic sources and referrers. Interactions gives you a deeper analysis into the individual updates you’ve made on your page and how people have interacted. This is great to get a quick overview of the kind of content that works and doesn’t work, so you can find out what your fans really want from your page.

Topsy – Twitter’s own search tool is certainly pretty advanced, allowing you to search by location, keywords you want to include and even sentiment on particular tweets. But a more comprehensive search engine that allows you to scan back further through tweets is Topsy. The screenshot below shows the insight you get into search terms, showing you how many others have retweeted, preview of the full links contained in tweets and allowing you to filter easily by hour, day, week, month or year. It is certainly one of the most comprehensive Twitter search engines I’ve seen, which doesn’t seem to get talked about as much as it should be.

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