Top Five Tools for Listening on the Social Web

 Moving from a 1.0 world to a 2.0 world can be very scary for nonprofits. Senior leadership, in particular, isn’t comfortable giving up power and fear that they will lose control of their core messaging. It’s critical that nonprofits face their fears and take control. Why? Because conversations about the issues you work on are consistently happening all over the web. Your nonprofit can either choose to join those conversations and help steer them or face the consequences. Being left out of online conversations not only gives your competitors the advantage of dominating discussions, it can often frame competitors as “the” leader around your issues in the online space. That’s not good!

If your nonprofit wants to start engaging in online conversations, first you need to start by listening to what people are saying about your organization and the issues you work on. You will want to analyze the competition too. Here are some of my favorite online listening and analytics tools.

Lay Of The Land: Who’s Saying What?

1. Addictomatic: This is by far the easiest way to create a listening dashboard for free. Type in a search term and it will generate the latest news, blog posts, videos and even images around the keyword. After it generates results (using a variety of search engines, news sites and social networks) you can personalize the dashboard. Bookmark it and check it daily. 

2. Topsy: Part search engine, part social web connector. When you search for something on Topsy, such as “climate change”, Topsy finds daily conversations that match the search term. The results are the items people link to, when discussing your search term via a social network, news website, blog, etc. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the “influence” of the people tweeting or writing about your issue. Bonus: It links to the conversationalists twitter profiles so you can follow them and engage with them on Twitter.

The Competition: How Do You Measure Up?

3. TwitterCounter: This is a great, free tool that quickly charts your organization’s growth on Twitter through your followers. Specifically it tracks your followers, who you are following, and number of tweets. It also provides averages such as average number of new followers daily. The premium version (about $15 a month) provides a deeper analysis and export options.

4. FollowerWonk: There are two cool components to FollowerWonk. First, your nonprofit can track your competition on Twitter and see how many followers they have and how many people they are following. It also shows you if your organizations “followers” and “following” overlap. Many organizations are surprised to learn that competitors often don’t share the same followers.

Second, you can track people on Twitter who are interested in your issues. Type in a search term on FollowerWonk and it will generate a list of the people on Twitter (ranked by the most amount of followers) who have that search term in their bio. http://www.followerwonk.com

5. Is Your Content Engaging Your Target Audiences?

PostRank: The PostRank Analytics package is a good investment if your organization wants to learn what content resonates (or doesn’t) with audiences across the social web. For example after web visitors click on a landing page, are they also tweeting it, digging it, etc? You can even track the reach of each page of your website. Bonus: It integrates with Google Analytics.

Who Has Time for All This Listening?

You probably wear many hats at your nonprofit and can’t spend half your day listening. Start out by selecting a couple of the listening tools and experiment with them for one month at least 3x a week. Use the results to help guide you in engaging with your audiences more. In 4-6 weeks move on and test 1-2 more tools. Bottom line - the more time you put in, the more you will get out.

Do you have other listening tools that are helpful to your organization? I would love to hear about them too.



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Comments

[Danielle Brigida]

Great post, these are definitely valuable tools to tracking the impact your campaigns and overall efforts are having! :) I use all! (even though I didn't know about Addictomatic til DC week!)

[Leonor Ciarlone]

Thank you! Just starting to put together BP for "listening" so this is very helpful... Have used Klout for Twitter perception stats, but dont more specific tips at the moment... Very manual effort so far...

[Katie]

Very, very useful, thanks for the post!!

Katie
www.Events.org

[Charles]

This reminds of Don't Think of an Elephant. These are rational responses to fears often based in ignorance. Using logical brain answers to respond to reptilian brain fears is often besides the point. My experience is not that nonprofit leaders gingerly set about exploring the terrain to make up their mind, it's that they start with emotional responses to the changing communications landscape, and then look for arguments to support those feelings.
The results of listening exercises are likely to feed those fears instead of helping to move folks towards change.

I think a more fun alternative is to figure out schemes to terrify nonprofit leaders more than social media does, and then make it clear that only expert use of social media will help alleviate that fear. (The Bush war PR strategy.) Statistics on donation patterns among millennials, aging donor base, amount of time spent on various websites like Facebook, and antsy board members breathing down an ED's neck might work better than listening tools.

Great tools though. Thanks!

[Melanie Baker]

Thanks for the inclusion, Allyson. :)

Can be a bit difficult to "get" how PostRank analyzes your content, though, so if any of your readers want to check it out, they can sign up for the free trial here: https://analytics.postrank.com/register/private (special page that doesn't require credit card info), and use the coupon code "frogloop" (no quotation marks) to get an extra three months on the trial.

And, of course, folks are welcome to ping me with any questions - melanie@postrank.com.

[Anne B]

Great post - I am just starting to bootstrap my org's SoMe efforts and our 1st step is listening. I did not know about Addictomatic until I read this. After a quick review, it is an excellent tool that I probably will incorporate.

Thanks!

[Daniel Schutzsmith]

Some other good ones that we're using with our clients are Hoot Suite (http://hootsuite.com) for multiple authors and tracking keywords, hashtags, and much more. We're also regularly using Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) to track was being said across the web about our client's causes.

[Angie Robinson]

You may find SocialMention.com useful.