Klout.com

Klout.com has produced a score that measures your overall influence across the social web. The Klout algorithm assigns a score between 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of social influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure true reach, amplification probability, and network score and is fast becoming the standard measuring tool for social marketers and brand advertisers engaging across the social web.





To get started with Klout just enter a Twitter account (doesn’t have to be yours) and generate your score. Creating a free account will allow you to track your Klout score over time to monitor your social growth and performance.

Social Mention

Socialmention.com is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Kurrently

Kurrently allows you to view real time Twitter and Facebook feeds for a given keyword. Use this tool to see how much activity a given search phrase, or keyword, is generating in your industry before jumping in on the conversation.

Google Trends

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. Google displays this information graphically via their Search Volume Index graph. Since search trends tend to reflect social interests, Google Trends is a great tool to measure activity related to trending topics in your industry or marketplace. You can then use this information to engage your followers on via your social outposts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and you Blog. 

Hot Searches reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather,” Hot Searches highlights searches that experience sudden surges in popularity, and updates that information hourly. The Google Trends algorithm filters out spam and removes inappropriate material to keep trend reports accurate and meaningful. For each search, Hot Searches shows related searches and a Search Volume Index graph. The page also displays news, blog posts, and web results to give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Searches list. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Searches were for that date by clicking change date.

Located beneath the search volume index graph is the reference volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular search term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. A very useful tool for tracking the relationship between industry news and search volume for translation into your social campaigns.

Twilert

If you’re anything like us, you love Twitter but despise the distractions caused by following numerous Tweeters, #hashtags and topics. Since we stumbled across Twilert we haven’t looked back. With Twilert we can setup email digests for all @mentions, #hashtags and keywords that we’re following on Twitter. Each Twilert you create contains custom search criteria and additional filter options including language, location, people and attitudes. The video below does a great job demonstrating the beautiful simplicity of this time saving tool:

Trendistic

Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. The result is a visualization of what is popular and what is not among Twitter users, and how certain events are reflected or even predicted by the micro blogosphere.

This is a great resource if you are trying to add the right hashtag (#) and stay relevant when things move so fast! You can enter a topic (#hashtag) in the Trendistic search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate. Each topic (#hashtag) will show in the chart with a specific color. You can even embed Trendistic into your site to follow important subjects as we’ve done below for net neutrality and FCC.

Twitter Counter

TwitterCounter.com gives you the ability to quickly tracker, followers, tweets and following metrics for any given Twitter account. You can also track the number of people Just enter the Twitter account(s) you’d like to track and the results are graphed right in front of you.

We use this tool internally to track the week-over-week progress of our social media campaigns. Hint: There’s a handy little feature called "save this graph" that will generate a formatted image for use in your social media reports.

Twittorati

From the creators of Technorati comes Twittorati; a tool that helps you locate and track the most influential Tweeters by category (channel). One of the best ways to spread your brand is to have it Tweeted by a highly influential Bloggers and Twitter users. The site tracks the Twitter activity of the top 100 bloggers on the Interne to help you identify key influencers in your industry. 

Twittorati also tracks top links used by top influencers in addition to top #hashtags. Use this feature to monitor popular #hashtags in your space, and ensure these #hashtags get into your own tweets if relevant.

My Tweet Cloud

This simple little app allows you to track the #hashtags used by any given Twitter handle. If you’re an avid Twitter user you can view all your past #hashtags in one place to review your own #hashtag history. If you are performing a competitive analysis you can review the #hashtags used by your competition, or other key influencers, to see how you match up.

Foller.me

If you’re looking to discover more information about a specific Twitter user, this app will give you a history of Twitter activity as well as all #hashtags and @mentions to date for a specified Twitter handle. A nice Google maps overlay allows you to visualize the geographic dispersion of followers for the queried Twitter handle.

Tickery

Tickery is a fun tool for exploring sets of Twitter friends and finding new people to follow. Tickery lets you visualize common "followings" amongst a pair given pair of defined Twitter users. For example, you may want to see common people that Connan Obrien and Jimmy Kimball follow on Twitter.  If you find yourself asking “I wonder if X person follows Y person?” you can easily do so without having to scroll through multiple pages on Twitter.com. Use this tool to identify additional key influencers and better understand who is influencing the influencers.