Measures of (Social-Media) Success

Klout

Scoring across three networks

Klout offers a daily summary of your organization's or team members' social-media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that's integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including HootSuite, CoTweet and Attensity360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Facebook Insights

Stats you can use

Facebook beefed up its Insights service this year, to good effect. Now Facebook Insights resembles Google Analytics in many ways. As a page admin, your dashboard gives you access to a trove of data: daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, daily interactions such as comments, geographic location of your visitors (broken down by country, city and language), external referrals, internal link traffic and more. When you have spikes of user engagement, Insights will show you what caused them. It'll show you what content most interests your readers, and it'll let you and your team understand and analyze growth trends. One big limitation is that you can't access a lot of the data older than a week.

Bit.ly

Are promotions working?

Our favorite URL shortener, 
bit.ly, provides double duty by offering analytics and click data for every link shortened. Click data lets you see how effective your social-media promotions are. Just log in to your account to see clickthrough numbers. A new feature, bundles, lets you group similar links together. Both the free version of bit.ly and bit.ly Pro handle our metrics needs without the need to upgrade to Enterprise ($995 per month).

TubeMogul

Who's watching your videos?