Lucidity

Social media research will give you an opportunity to connect with consumers and get a candid glimpse at how they feel about your brand. Their discussions, comments and ratings of your product and/or service can give you the insight you need to create a stronger marketing message.

In order to build a great marketing foundation you need to start with the right tools – this rule applies in the social media space as well. Using the proper tools to evaluate your brand can help give you a better understanding of where your brand fits in the consumer’s mind. We’ve compiled a list here to aid your analysis. These tools, some free and some not, will help gauge your brand’s social media footprint.

Before you start the conversation, there are some important questions to consider:

Where are they talking?
What social media outlets are social media users using to talk about your brand?

What are they saying?
Is it positive, negative, insightful?

Who is talking?
Are they your target, or are they another market you hadn’t considered?

Why are they talking?
Do they just love or hate your brand?

When are they talking?
Is your brand in the news? Or do people just want to talk about it all the time?

How to interpret the data?
After reviewing the outcome, what’s the next step? How do you position your brand based on what you’ve learned?

Our team scoured the web to identify the tools that would most helpful in determining your social position. After review of over 40 tools we isolated the ones below as the best of the best. We have categorized them

Blog Tools

The sites below will show you how bloggers are responding to your brand and broadcasting throughout the web

Google Blog Search
(Google.com/blogsearch)

• Continuously-updated, powerful blog search engine
• Subscribe to a blog search feed, and create custom e-mail alerts

Blog Pulse
(Blogpulse.com)

• Nielsen Company blog search engine currently searches from over 78.7 million blogs
• Provides trend info and statistics on what blogs are discussing via an intuitive interface

Forum Tools

These tools will show you how consumers dialogue with each other about your brand.

Forum Find
(ForumFind.com)

• Google-powered search for keyword use in online forums lets you gauge how your brand is being discussed in online communities

Board Tracker
(boardtracker.com)

• Keyword Search engine for over 32,000 forum

Search Tools

The tools below will illustrate how your brand is identified in searches. Through these tools you will be able to see trends in how consumers look for information on your brand.

Google Trends
(trends.google.com)

• Identifies trends in searches for specific terms as well as news references
• Compare brands, topics, terms to identify correlations and comparative search weights

Google Alerts
(google.com/alerts)

• Sign up for e-mail notifications based on your preferred keywords

Yahoo Alerts
(alerts.yahoo.com)

• Sign up for e-mail notifications based on your preferred keywords

Facebook Tools

The tools below will help you understand how people may be discussing your brand on one of the most influential social media applications.

Adonomics
(adonomics.com)

• Tracks number of installs and active users for all of Facebook’s 33,000+ Applications

Facebook Lexicon
(Facebook.com/lexicon)

• Lexicon counts occurrences of keywords on Walls over time, displaying results in an interactive graph

Lexicon can show a direct relationship between terms – here the correlation between “party tonight” and “hangover” have been illustrated

Now that you have these tools and know where to find them, you’re ready to enter the social media-scape and find out how people and communities are connecting with your brand.

Our next post will put it all together in an easy to use, step-by-step guide that will provide you with a comprehensive arsenal of social media knowledge to help arm you for your next agency briefing.