It’s a known fact (even if it’s not discussed openly at an office coffee room) that every office has a certain something-something boss who always finds a question that’s impossible to answer - and not because you lack the knowledge and/or experience, but because there is not a real answer to the question.
The question of such nature that I’m referring to is – how to measure social media influence. In other words – how to measure the success of the social media? You can’t, really.I keep thinking on how to actually answer this question, every time someone asks that. That’s why I really liked how it was defined by Mashable.com.
“Social media influence is a bit like oxygen – we "know" it's there and we know in some sense that it is essential for “life” if we’re in marketing, advertising or public relations”, but we can’t really physically touch, smell and taste it, can we?
However, don’t get too discouraged and anxious at the thought that you won’t be able to answer this question, once approached again by your boss. There are a number of tools – freely available on the Web – purport to tell us our overall social media influence or at least a bit of it. And while none is perfect or complete yet, using a combination of them can prove useful.
Here then is a roundup of tools that measure influence in the social web:
