All entries for Tuesday 02 April 2013

Which tools monitor your social media influence & impact?

Twitter is the main social media tool that I would recommend to researchers, when it comes to influence and impact. Ideally, I think it should be used alongside blogging in some way: either your own blog if you want to build an online identity and audience for yourself, or as a guest on others' blogs. Guest blogging is a great way of benefitting from others' hard work in gaining audience!

If Twitter is my main social media tool then any tool for measuring online/social media influence and impact will need access to my Twitter account. A quick look at the "Apps" section of my settings on Twitter reminds me of tools that I've once thought might be of value to researchers for the purpose of increasing, measuring and demonstrating the impact of their research. I've not had time to investigate these properly, but I thought that it might be worth sharing which ones I'm interested in, which are:

Naymz - "Manage and measure your reputation. Get rewarded!"

Klout - "Klout finds the most influential people on every topic"

Crowdbooster - "Measure and optimize your social media marketing."

I had a quick look back at these three and found that Crowdbooster now charges a fee: this might be worthwhile, if it covers the social media channels that you use, though it has different pricing mechanisms for different numbers of social media channels.

Naymz - wants to co-ordinate my Google account, Yahoo account, email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These are big hitters but not specific to academia.

Klout - lots more options here than there were for Naymz, but none specifically academic.

There are actually lots of tools for measuring social media influence out there, but to find the right tool for you then you need to know what you want to measure. I'm interested in Twitter, website visitors and my blog, but not necessarily combining the scores for them, since they serve different purposes. I do need to investigate more...

For those interested in reading more, this piece from Imperial College has a great summary and table comparing the tools available for measuring and monitoring, in terms of the social media sources they monitor:

http://research20atimperial.wordpress.com/optional-content/evaluation-tools/

There is no substitute for trying things out for yourself, though, and finding out not only which aspects of your social media activity can be monitored by which tools, but also how they produce their scores and what this means for your own work.

Jenny Delasalle : 02 Apr 2013 19:53 |  Tags: Altmetrics Impact Researchers Social Networking |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem