Social Media Measurement Lags Adoption – Top 15 Free Social Media Tools

Social media networks are attracting business professionals worldwide, according to an August 2009 survey by Mxinga and Babson Executive Education. However quantitative feedback from these professionals is at an astonishingly low number.

“Despite widespread adoption of social media, measurement still lags. Only 16% of those polled said they currently measured ROI for their social media programs. More than four in 10 respondents did not even know whether the social tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.”

As marketing budgets feel the strain of the economic downturn expect medium to large companies to begin adopting social media measurement tools as part of their marketing campaigns.

Here’s measurementcamp’s list of free tools:

1.Addictomatic A search engine that aggregates rss feeds into a nice visual dashboard
www.addictomatic.com/
2.Blogpulse Blog search engine with conversation tracker tool
www.blogpulse.com/
3.Boardreader Search forums and message boards
www.boardreader.com
4.Boardtracker Forum search engine offering instant alerts
www.boardtracker.com
5.Buzzmonitor Embeddable widget showing recent instances of your search term
www.buzzm.worldbank.org
6.Compete.com Comparable site metrics for any website
www.compete.com
7.Del.ici.ous Social bookmarking engine. Search by tags and subscribe to feed results
www.delicious.com
8.Facebook lexicon Searches facebook walls for words and phrases
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/
9.Google alerts Email updates of key search terms
www.google.com/alerts
10.Google insights Compare search volume over time
www.google.com/insights
11.Google trends Compare search term trends
www.google.com/trends
12.Howsociable Gives a social media score for your brand, with email updates of your score.
www.howsociable.com
13.Ice rocket Blog search engine with results rss feed
www.icerocket.com
14.Newsflashr News search engine, presenting results in nice dashboard
www.newsflashr.com
15.Twitter Search for keywords in ‘tweets’.
http://search.twitter.com

Honorable mention- Bit.ly and Cli.gs – analytics for your tiny urls
http://bit.ly/

Learn more about Social Media Measurement Strategies by visiting www.allianceinteractive.com or contact Alliance Interactive at 888.222.9056.