With the growing buzz around Klout, it’s clear people want to gain a better understanding of our social network presence, its reach and influence.  There’s several tools out there to help determine this to some extent.  These online tools allow us to identify influencers across networks and take action with a more qualitative approach in dealing with social media.

Klout

Klout is a tool that measures influence on social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and others.  The most important aspect to consider is Klout Score, determined by the size of your social network, content and how users interact with your posted content.  Klout scores range from 0 to 100, 20 being the average score.

To help brands engage more with influencers, the company is launching a new feature called Brand Squads.  These are dedicated, centralized profile pages that allow companies to better engage with influencers.

“Brand Squads are Klout’s way of giving influencers a place to be recognized and have a direct impact on the brands they care about most,” said Klout’s David Temple.

Brand Squads pages can help users to monitor information about the recent development of a brand, watch the flow of information across social media, and earn access to special Perks.

Google Ripples

One of the least publicized features of Google+ is Ripples, a visual depiction of your content’s behavior once it’s been posted.  With Ripples you can see who’s shared your content, how large their networks are and how much impact you’re content’s had on the network overall.  It’s all graphed nicely with soft colors and circle representations, so you can immediately identify the influencers, learn more about them and add them to your network.

You’ll also find a set of analytics at the bottom of the page, displaying a series of useful stats pertaining to your reach, the number of shares a particular post received, and how far it’s traveled.  Known for its Google Analytics, the Ripples feature offers great insight to your Google+ account and is particularly useful for brands.

What’s more, you can search any Google+ URL on Ripples to see how it’s performed.  This feature has not yet rolled out to all Google+ users, but if you view this public Ripple, you can try a URL search on your own.

Google also updated its social analytics tool recently to help marketers capture the full impact of social media to their websites. The new tool can evaluate traffic coming from social networks, and understand the impact on direct and deferred conversions.  It also helps to understand various activities happening on and off of a site to improve user engagement and increase key performance indicators.

For example, if someone visits a website through a link on Twitter, then come back in a week to buy something, Google Analytics will be able to monitor this scenario for a broader understanding of whether a marketing campaign on Facebook or Twitter is paying off or not.

The tool also includes a tab activity called “Activity Stream” to monitor what people are saying publicly across social networks. The new social reports provide an opportunity to analyze the full range of social information, as well as provide a more complete picture of social influence.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a tool that can greatly help in measuring the performance of Facebook pages.  The tool helps in defining a strategy for relevant and targeted content.

With Facebook Insights you can measure post performance, determine how many people have created stories, shared, liked or commented on your content, including negative feedback.

HootSuite

HootSuite is probably known as tool of communication amongst social network marketers.  The tool offers a wide range of analytical applications that allow teams to efficiently track conversations and measure campaign results.

The social media dashboard tool is used to manage multiple social profiles, track brand mentions, schedule messages and tweets, and analyze social media traffic.

With HootSuite you can follow the indicators of your brand with social media traffic, you can analyze your pages and you can count the increasing number of fans. Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can also be integrated into your HootSuite account, making the tool even more valuable.

Social Bakers

Social Bakers offers a range of tools that not only help to measure and compare social marketing, but help you improve performance and maximize your ROI across all major networks, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.

Their Engagement Analytics and Engagement Builder offer a monitoring service that has become a widely visited site for looking up Facebook statistics.

This week the company launched Analytics PRO technology to track Facebook and Twitter campaign performance. The technology helps enterprises, SMEs and small business identify, engage and track their most important social influencers.

The tool can be used to simplify social analytics, provide fan page scores, key performance indicators and competitive analysis.