There's little point having an active social media presence without measuring how your strategy is working, and which areas need improvement.

Thankfully, you don't need to be a statistician to make sense of the data and improve your social media standing, as these analytics tools show.

Brandify

Developed by Microsoft, Brandify is a free service that helps SME's measure and improve their online brand presence.

Once you enter your brand name and details Brandify scours the web to give your brand a rating, with hard data and recommendations into how to improve your influence.

Crazy Egg

It might be a crazy name, but Crazy Egg offer a very sensible way of understanding how users are interacting with your website.

Besides the usual analytics capabilities, Crazy Egg's point of difference is its use of heat signatures and scroll maps.

Essentially, Crazy Egg analyses your website to produce a visual heatmap, similar to a weather map, showing the places where users most often click.

It's a fun, effective way to see not only which pages are most popular, but people's browsing habits. For example, if most users are clicking on the top right hand side of your page, you might want to consider moving a sign up sheet or checkout box there.

Crazy Egg starts at $9.00 per month, with a free trial available.

Mention

Mention creates alerts based around everything from your brand name and industry to keywords. Once you set up the terms you'd like to search for, Mention will then send updates via email or social media whenever it registers a hit.

Mention also allows you to track mentions across blogs, websites, forums and social media sites, as well as displaying the source of each alert. For example, if the alert occurs on Twitter Mention will show not only the tweet, but the bio of the person who posted the tweet.

There is a free plan for beginners, with the ProPlan starting at $19.99 per month. For the ease of use and wide net it casts, Mention is excellent value for money.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to track new content relating to specified key words. Whenever Google finds a new result that matches your terms (i.e. news articles, blog posts, etc.), they send you an email.

It’s a great way for staying up-to-date about what’s being said about your business and your competitors.

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