Nine free tools for measuring social ROI

On Pinterest, registering a Pinterest Business account (which is free!) will give you access to Pinterest Analytics, which gives you data on the number of impressions and views your Pinterest profile is getting, as well as your top performing Pins.

If you want a more detailed look at your reach on Twitter, TweetReach is a useful tool. The free version will give you access to a “snapshot” of any hashtag, account username or keyword estimating how many impressions it has made and how many individual accounts have been reached by that term (or person).

The free snapshots only go back as far as a week with a limit of 100 tweets, so to get access to a more detailed analysis, you would need to upgrade to one of TweetReach’s paid options. However, the snapshots can be a useful ‘in the moment’ overview, and there’s nothing to stop you coming back any number of times to take additional snapshots over time, or to look up other keywords and hashtags to build up a bigger picture.

Simply Measured provides a range of free reports that give insight into user engagement across a number of different social platforms: mainly Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram with a little bit of Vine. The last two in that list (Google+ and Instagram) are particularly useful as the two networks don’t provide any free engagement analytics of their own.

The free reports are only available to social profiles below a certain size – e.g. up to 100,000 Circlers on Google+, up to 25,000 followers on Instagram – and do require you to give a bit in return. You have to fill in a capture form with basic details like name, email address and job title, and each report type has a one-time “cost” which is usually some kind of social promotion like a tweet or a Facebook like. The hoop jumping can be a bit annoying, especially if you want several different reports, but such is the price of a free lunch. The reports have some worthwhile insight to give, and I particularly like the ‘engagement as a percentage of followers’ stat on Instagram, which shows if your account is living up to its engagement potential (or exceeding it) as well as the comment keyword analysis for Google+.

Circle Count is a free tool for measuring and improving your performance on Google+. It works with both personal accounts and brand pages, providing a breakdown of the engagement on your most recent posts by type: followers, comments, +1s and reshares. It uses blue and red bars to show how much better or worse each post performed compared to the one before it – a neat way to track progress at a glance.

I found Circle Count’s layout a little scattered and difficult to navigate, but the most important pages are your Dashboard for personal analytics, and your Pages for a page overview. Alternatively, you can set up your Google+ Page to act like a profile and use it to sign in to Circle Count, which will then show Page analytics in place of personal ones. Another useful feature is the Follow Map, which creates a heat map to show where your Google+ followers are located, helping you to tailor your social content geographically.