Social marketing monitoring tools supposedly help you measure your "influence" online.
But how valuable are they? Are they an accurate reflection of your actual influence as a marketer? I don't think so.
As a matter of fact, of all the metrics you should be concerned about, these social marketing monitoring tools are, for the most part, a complete waste of time.
One of the reasons I believe that is they have almost no relevancy in a real world business.
If a measurement tool says you're a "95 out of 100" in influence, but your website generated two sales last month, who cares? By the same token, if you have 100,000 Twitter followers, and your website analytics shows you get slim to no traffic from Twitter, then your true "influence" is small, regardless of what these third party systems tell you.
Here's what I recommend you do to determine your real social influence: 1.
Master the analytics that really matter, your website visitors.
I use Google analytics, a free, "mostly accurate" measurement tool that does a great job of telling me where traffic comes from.
I can instantly see how many visitors I get from all the social networks, and determine which is best for each site.
I can also tell exactly where the actual sales are coming from.
So just because a website sends a ton of traffic doesn't mean I'm going to work that site harder than any other unless I also see a corresponding conversion rate.
2.
Use tracking links in your social postings.
Ideally, these would not be URL shrinking services, but actual tracking links with your URL and an appended code at the end that allows you to track actual clicks.
For example, I will often use a tracking link and invite people to my blog using Twitter, or an e-mail blast, or both.
If I use a different tracking link for each, I can quickly see how many clicks I get from each different medium.
3.
Focus on quality over quantity.
Many of these influence tools use things like quantity of Twitter followers or YouTube subscribers as an indicator of influence.
But they are often very misleading.
For example, many marketers used the trick of mass following to gain followers, then dumping those that don't follow back, and through a constant stream of mass follows they raise their following numbers.
The fact is, these types of followers are very low quality, didn't seek the marketer out, and couldn't care less what they have to say.
Give me 1,000 true followers who truly care about my message, over 50,000 fake followers any day.
But the "influence tools" would indicate the person with 50,000 has more influence, even though they really don't.
In the end, real influence can be measured in actual conversions on your site.
If you're reaching your sales goals, you have influence.
If you aren't, you don't, and that's the only influence that really matters in the end.