The following list is adapted from Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy's Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself.
In today's turbulent business environment, millions of people are seeking to strengthen their personal brands, and demonstrate far greater value to potential customers and employers. Here are 10 tools to help you meet your goals:
1. Twitter Grader is a site that allows you to track, measure, and increase your influence in the world of Twitter. By entering your Twitter name, the system pulls data for your account. You can track the history of your follower growth or the amount of tweets that were sent. You can also track your influence among your specific location. It ranks you based on influence.
2. Website Grader is brought to you by the same people who created Twitter Grader. Website Grader allows you to enter your website with a competitor and receive a report that has information like blog analysis, blog grade, recent blog articles, Google index pages, and readability level. It also helps you optimize your content from headings to images. It is an extremely comprehensive and worthwhile report.
3. Twitalyzer (is an intense Twitter management, measuring and monitoring tool that allows you to do a ton of different things in the world of Twitter. This includes automatic daily updates, full data export, email support, weekly email reports, phone support, custom URL shortener, and multiple-account tracking.
4. Google PageRank is an algorithm Google uses to assign numerical weighting to each element of a website with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance with other sites. Basically, it's how important your site is. To check your Google PageRank, we recommend checking out the PR Checker PageRank took at www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php. Just enter your URL and the tool generates your PageRank and gives you additional information on how to expand the number.
5. BackType is a free system that allows you to measure your impact in social media. After you enter your URL in the very Google-looking box, BackType gives you information about your latest pages, your top influencers, and where the majority of your interaction is happening on the web.
6. Key Word Rank Checker is a way to check the rankings for a domain for a particular set of keywords or phrases. Thousands of tools can help you accomplish this task. Surf to Google and search for "free keyword rank checker." After finding a suitable tool, track the progress and ranking for your particular keywords or phrases.
7. PostRank is a system that tracks where and how users engage and what they pay attention to – in real time. PostRank social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author. This site is the place to be because it is the largest aggregator of social engagement data on the Internet.
8. Bit.ly Pro offers several measuring and tracking implications. You have the ability to track single domains, multiple domains, advanced dashboard for data layout, real-time data analytics feed, and customer support. Bit.ly Pro could help in measuring how many people click a specific link.
9. HootSuite offers an analytics suite that helps you track links and the Klout scores of your followers. The system is not as robust as PostRank, but it still offers information that is extremely valuable to the user. Oh, and it's free.
10. Twitrratr is an extremely valuable tool to measure what people are saying about a given keyword. It tries to measure sentiment with positive, neutral, and negative outpourings from Twitter. Although this site is not 100% accurate, it can be a valuable addition to your social media measurement suite.
Erik Deckers, owner and VP of creative services at Professional Blog Service in Indianapolis, Indiana, provides content management and social media consulting to companies of all sizes. He has worked for the last 17 years in marketing, sales, PR, and crisis communications. Kyle Lacy is founder and CEO of Brandswag Corporation, a boutique social media firm working with businesses up to $400-million in revenue. His blog, KyleLacy.com, has been featured on The Wall Street Journal's website and Read Write Web's daily blog journal and was voted one of the world's top 150 social media blogs.
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