Social Media - 4 Tools to Start Making Sense of the Clutter

As part of product management at Yesmail, I'm looking at emerging technologies and how they can complement email marketing technologies -including Social Media. As such I've had to explain how social media works in relation to other marketing channels. I hope you'll find these tools useful in presentations to many who are new to social media. Below are four visual representations of social media seen through the lens of traditional marketing: audience sizing, demographic reach, and analytics.

1. Top Traffic sites in Social Media. This quick & easy graphic provides a layout of social media types (Platforms, Blogs, Networks, Micro-blogging, etc) and their unique traffic numbers based on Comscore/TechCrunch for November. You can play around with the graphic here. This is useful when answering the question "Just how big is this channel? How many users are using these technologies?" Keep in mind, there's overlap in users on social networks, blogs, etc.

2. Demographic Differences for a Few Social Networks. using demographic data from Rapleaf's July numbers - this illustrates differences between Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and LinkedIn in terms of key demographics (gender and age). Of course, you can further select targeted demographics and keywords within these social networks for advertising, but you can see self-reported data using pie charts. You can download Rapleaf's full report and pull demographic profiles from a host of social networks.

3. Social Media Analytics - SM2 by Techrigy. SM2 provides a good user interface for monitoring general buzz in social media. You can easily drill down to get a sense of what made buzz, and where it came from. SM2 allows you to select custom searches on competitors. Plus, it's free for the first 1000 keywords. Here's a profile of them from the Groundswell blog. Includes graphs, sentiment, demographics and custom search.

4. Search.Twitter.com. As a quick illustration, this tool is very effective at getting a sense what's being said on twitter about your brand, and how often in c0mparison with the competition. If there are doubts that no-one talks about your company - try this!