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If you’ve been on the Internet or have watched TV this week, you probably heard that Oscar Host Ellen DeGeneres succeeded in her goal to post the most re-tweeted tweet in Twitter history. This selfie of her and her best buddies was retweeted so often that Twitter broke on Sunday night.
If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
Getting traction on Twitter can be challenging. If your name isn’t Ellen DeGeneres, you may be wondering whether anyone is paying attention to you on Twitter. You might send out a tweet that seems to end up in a black hole, with no one paying attention to your important message.
How can you learn how effective you are on Twitter? How can you know whether your tweets are disappearing into an abyss? Your follower count increase but a follow from someone who has 1 million followers is very different from a follow from someone who has 100 followers.
You can see how measuring your impact on social media could be a bit complicated. The good news is that there’s a free tool to help you gauge your activity on social media.
SumAll is a service that gives you a social media report card for Twitter and many other social media sites. SumAll analyzes your activity across your social media accounts and provides you with graphs and daily and weekly reports of your activities so you can see how you’re doing. You can connect your accounts at Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram and many more sites.
If you love data you’ll enjoy the graphs SumAll provides to track your activity. You can set time periods and hone in on a specific date. You can compare time periods and different measurements. For example, you can see whether following more people on Twitter increases the number of people who follow you.
You can also compare between social networks and get a tally of your followers on all of your connected networks. You’re probably more popular than you thought you were!
SumAll can also be used by businesses to track marketing campaigns and revenue from online sales. You can set goals and track activity on sites such as Amazon, eBay, Paypal, and more.
Getting Started with SumAll
To get started with SumAll, sign up for an account with your email address and connect the social media accounts you want it to monitor.
SumAll guides you through the process with a tour to get you started.
Once you’ve connected your accounts, SumAll lets you know that it’s indexing your social media activity which could take a little while. You can have SumAll email you when your reports are ready or you can keep checking the SumAll website.
Using SumAll
SumAll provides you with daily and weekly reports of your activity on the social media networks you’ve connected. Here’s my SumAll report from last week:
You can also get in-depth information from graphing your activity using SumAll. You can see your activity over time and compare different social networks. If you aren’t sure what a line on the graph means, point your cursor to it and a pop up window will explain what you’re seeing.
You can track information on Twitter including:
- Tweets
- Following
- Followers
- Mentions
- Mention reach
- Replies
- Retweets
- Retweet reach
You can also compare information with other social networks.
[note]Reach is key on social media. Your reach is the potential number of people who would see your post on social media. So if a tweet is retweeted by someone with 1 million followers, that tweet’s reach would be much greater than a tweet that was retweeted by someone with 100 followers.[/note]
Looking at the graphs you can see which days you were the most engaging on social networks and whether engagement among social networks is consistent. If you have a website you can connect your Google Analytics account to see if your most active traffic days on your site correspond to your most active days on social media.
You can see how often you posted content across your social networks to see how active you’ve been. You can compare this and see if posting has gained you additional followers.
You can also measure the “Energy of Your Community” which is the total advocacy of your connections on your social networks. You can come up with your own custom measurements, such as number of followers on Twitter + number of followers on Google Plus.
[tip]80/20 Rule
As with most social media, the key to Twitter is to engage. Focus on sharing others’ messages if you want your message shared. Stick to the 80/20 Rule, with 80% of your tweets supporting others, retweeting others’ tweets or articles, and just 20% of your tweets sending out your message.
[/tip]
Sharing Your SumAll Report Card
SumAll can automatically share your social proof. In Settings you can allow SumAll to tweet your report card weekly and/or monthly. SumAll will tweet to the world from your account the tally of your best performing stats. SumAll can also tweet a “thank you” each week to your top three followers, based on their retweet reach.
SumAll Apps
You can also get your SumAll report card on the go. Download free SumAll apps for:
The app has basic information for you on the go, a glimpse of how you’re doing for the day, week and month.
What Else You Need to Know
SumAll is in beta mode, meaning it’s in a trial phase, though anyone can sign up to try it. The service is free so far but no word has been given from SumAll about what the fees will be for their service when it comes out of beta mode.
SumAll has been around for over two years and already is used by over 40,000 companies. You can find out more from SumAll from its Year in Review.
Your Thoughts
Have you been looking for a way to monitor your activity on social media? Have you ever used SumAll? Are you trying to break Ellen’s record for most retweets? Let us know in the Comments section below!
Hi Carolyn! This is a fabulous post with a FABULOUS tool…I can pretty much forget about getting anything else accomplished today as I play with this great analytic aid. 🙂 You share the most wonderful tips and tools…thank you so much!
Claudia
Hi Claudia, I’m so glad you’re enjoying SumAll. You’re right, it’s a fabulous resource. So hard to believe that it’s free, but it is! It’s fun exploring the different ways you can configure the graphs to show you information.
My graphs show a lot of parallels between activity on social media and traffic here at this site. I think everyone can learn important information from SumAll!
Hello; You did a great job explaining what sum all is and how to use it. as a blind computer user I’m hesitant to join services like this because often all those stats aren’t accessible for me. basically it doesn’t matter how much information is there if you can’t navigate it. thanks again and take care, max
Hi Maxwell, Yes, the graphs may not be accessible to you as a blind used, but I’m wondering if the email reports from SumAll would work well for you. If your computer reads the content of emails to you, then the reports might be a valuable source of information for you.
SumAll is free so you could try it to see if the email reports work for you, Maxwell.
hi Carolyn; that makes me feel better about going through the process of creating an account and linking my networks to it. and worst case i can always forward the emails to a friend and have them tell me what it all means. thanks and take care, Max
Hi Maxwell, I hope SumAll works out well for you!
Wow, this tool is amazing. I’ve never heard of it. The only tracking I have been using is more for web visitors and SERPs (SEOPressor for WordPress). I’ve never really found anything that fits well with Social but can’t wait to test this thing out. Love the price too!
Thanks for sharing Carolyn and awesome review.
Hi Johnny, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! I’m glad you’re as excited about SumAll as I am. You’re right, this is truly an amazing tool and even more so because it’s free. You’ll be impressed with how many of your accounts you can link and with the many data views the graphs provide. I especially like how you can create your own metrics by combining different social media measures.
Enjoy SumAll, Johnny!
Hi Carolyn,
Wow! This tool certainly seems powerful although I had never heard of it before.
I am going to try this out. Now, you mentioned that it is in beta. So, when are they supposed to go live full fledged? Any ideas on that?
Thanks for sharing about this awesome information Carolyn. This is very informative post.
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar, Yes, I’ve been using SumAll for over six months now and find its information incredibly useful. The later the better for SumAll getting out of beta, as far as I’m concerned. SumAll delivers copious quantities of valuable information for free.
Once it’s out of beta, SumAll will evolve to a freemium model with fees for some information, geared to small and medium businesses. I’m hoping that the features for individuals remain free after SumAll sheds its “beta” status.
Enjoy checking out SumAll, Kumar!
Hey Carolyn,
This is something I’ve been looking for? I started using analytics last year but it would definitely great to have something like Sumall on the go. I check my analytics once a week and I’m always looking for ways to get my content to get more shares as well as to see how active I have been! Thanks for the review on this great tool. I’ll definitely check it out!
Hi Sherman, Yes, it sounds as if you will make good use of SumAll, both of the monthly and weekly report as well as the cool graphs. The reports are very handy for quick updates about your activity and the graphs are useful when you want to explore your activity in more depth.
I hope you enjoy SumAll, Sherman!
Hey Carolyn,
Okay, great resource and all of them in one place. I love this and I’ve got to go and sign up for an account my friend. Knowing you can check your stats like that and I’m definitely going to need to do that more as the year progresses I know for sure.
You find the coolest stuff ever. Thank you for sharing it with us. Okay, off to go grab me an account now before I get busy doing anything else.
Have a great weekend.
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne, Yes, you will find SumAll very useful. The reports can keep you up to date easily on your social media activity. I know you enjoy exploring your analytics, Adrienne, so you’ll really enjoy the graphs SumAll lets you create, comparing many different engagement factors. As you’re the Engagement Superstar, your graphs will be very interesting, Adrienne! :-bd
Awesome share Carolyn! I’ve never heard of SumAll before, and we’ve all seen various analytics before, but this looks very impressive. 😉
It’s also good to know about the 80/20 rule… a social media variation of the Pareto principle. Cool!
Thanks for an informative post!
Bill
Hi Bill, Yes, SumAll is very impressive. The information you can get from SumAll is unlike what I’ve found from any other service. What’s also impressive is that all of this is absolutely free!
Yes, the 80/20 rule is very useful to remember as you’re trying to get traction on social media. You’re right, it is close to the Pareto Principle, good point!
So glad you’re giving SumAll a try, Bill. Thanks for letting us know.
Hey Carolyn,
Sumall is awesome 😀 I have been using it for a while now (although I doubt whether I have used it effectively…I need to analyze the data, not just look at it and be happy/sad when there is or there isn’t any growth).
Have you test-drived the new version? It’s awesome…hopefully, all this will remain free (At least for the top 4-5 social media sites? Or they could allow users to monitor 4-5 sites, in general, and charge for more? :D).
Anyways, thank you for the review, Carolyn 🙂 Hope you are ready for the weekend 😀
Hi Jeevan, Yes, the new SumAll will be launched eventually as a paid service for small and medium sized businesses but no word yet on when that will be, what the pricing is and what other features will be offered. I will certainly update readers here when the time comes that SumAll leaves beta and makes significant changes.
For now though, SumAll does provide very useful information for anyone who is on social media and/or has a website. I’m glad you have enjoyed using SumAll, Jeevan!
Hi Carolyn,
I really enjoyed this post. I had never heard of SumAll before but, you can bet I’m going to go sign up for an account. This is Awesome.
I love tech stuff and it’s a great idea to keep track of Twitter like this. Thanks for all the info and this deserves a +.
Geri
Wow, Geri, thanks for my blogging report card! So glad this was helpful to you. I hope you enjoy SumAll!