Free online social media tools can help you determine strengths and weaknesses

By Jd Lasica

A modest tracking dashboard

PostRank provides detailed information on tweets, stumbles, Diggs and FriendFeed all in one place. It's suited to blogs and websites with a lot of content. Under its free plan, you can track and compare your sites and your competition — up to five sites in all — to get the full picture of your social engagement. You can also track your static and offsite content (PDFs, YouTube videos, SlideShare content) for up to 10 sites.

Flickr

Are your pictures trending?

Flickr was one of the earliest social networks to provide metrics about how many people view your photos. For instance, you'll be able to see such stats as views for your photos, sets and galleries — today, yesterday and all time — your most viewed photos and videos, and how many have been geotagged  or have comments. I just wish  Flickr would tell you how many people are embedding your photos on their sites.

Soovox

For brand lovers

Soovox has a slightly different take on the Klout model: Discover your Social IQ, share your likes and earn rewards. Your "social influence quotient" measures your online social presence footprint and assigns it a value that gets translated into rewards. The money you make can go to your organization or to your favorite charity.

Soovox is more geared to individuals who like to share their opinions about brands and products they love, but it's worth a look.

Other tools worth a look

Here are some other metrics tools we like. Not all of them are free:

SeoQuake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping Web publishers who deal with search engine optimization and Internet promotion of websites. SeoQuake allows users to assess important SEO parameters of an Internet project on the fly.
Social Report offers a social- network performance tracking, monitoring and reporting tool. It comes with a 30-day trial and prices starting at just $9 a month.
Foursquare and Yelp provide business dashboards that have the ability to review check-in data and other metrics.
Technorati and BlogPulse are blog search engines. Look for metrics around bloggers' influence and authority.
Google Trends provides information on Web search trends around key terms and topics. It shows how often your topics have appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic region people have searched for them  the most.
Xinureturns provides a dashboard overview of your site's standing in social media. Run a report and you'll receive information on Technorati, Google PageRank, Diggs and even backlinks to your website.
Tribe Monitor is a social statistics aggregator that helps you keep track of your fan base on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.