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You might know how your brand is performing at your retail outlets, but do you know how your brand is performing online?

The average Facebook user spends more than 12% of their time on the social media network says a recent comScore research study. It naturally follows that where consumers spend there time, businesses are sure to follow. But, where does it end?

CMOs that were surveyed by the CMO club and Bazaarvoice have stated that their businesses were engaged deeply in social media, concentrating their efforts on 3 channels. However, thirty five percent of the Chief Marketing officers surveyed were not aware if their presence on Facebook had yielded any ROI.

Eric Peterson, a founder of online measurement tool Twitalyzer said that it was irresponsible for businesses to pour money into branding online utilizing Social Media, and not measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Measuring your brand’s influence online is a relatively recent development, but it just might be one of the most critical developments when marketing online since Google came out with AdWords. Gaining first-hand knowledge how much your business engages with the online community, understanding which tools to use and more importantly which ones are effective for your business is paramount to successful online branding.

Quantitative Influence Measurement

Quantitatively measuring a brand’s online influence is a relatively new idea, but it may be one of the most important developments in online marketing since Google AdWords. Understanding how your company interacts with its online community, and knowing which tools are effective is crucial for driving your brand’s overall success.

Over the past few years there have been several companies that have brought innovation and creativity to the quantitative online branding measurement arena. Quite a few of them function in a similar fashion with their own unique bells and whistles. They utilize sophisticated algorithms to compute your influence online after connecting your Social Media accounts. They then present the information in a visual fashion using pie charts, colorful graphs and numbers, interpreting the data in a plethora of ways. Some of the tools even let you know the most optimum time to post based on your time zone.

Let’s take a look at a few of these tools, designed to measure your brand’s online influence.

Throughout the modern age, every medium used to broadcast and promote has been measured. TV for example has Nielsen ratings, so why not Klout for Social Media. By linking the social media channels you employ, whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, Klout gets to work by measuring over thirty five varied elements that can be categorized as follows:

Reach – The size of your engaged audience

Amplification – The potential for your content to be acted upon by others

Network Influence – The level of influence of your engaged audience

This combination of elements create your overall score which ranges between 1 to 100. What Klout does for brands is it connects them with influential individuals belonging to the various social networks. Brands are rewarding their consumers with high Klout scores by presenting them with special offers as an incentive to keep sharing what they love with their community.

Crowdbooster is a tool that analyzes your Twitter channel. It is designed to help managers manage their communities in Social Media. The focus of Crowdbooster is not only to give you a score to let you know how your brand is doing, but also providing you with guidelines on how you can do better.

It tracks your follower growth, highlighting your top retweeters and followers of your brand it deems most influential. It utilizes a scanner plot graph that makes it easier to identify the top tweets and topics that engaged the most. Going further, the tool recommends the best time of the day to tweet based on when your followers with the most influencers are active. It also allows you to schedule reminders.

Addictomatic is a tool that provides you with a detailed snapshot of your brand’s presence across the search engine spectrum, including video search engines such as YouTube and Vimeo. All you need to do is to type your brand name in quotes and you’ll get an in depth picture of what is happening on the web, based on your area of expertise.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to measure your brand’s online influence. With the web being a dynamic place and the results of these tools being more static, you need to constantly be using these tools to compare numbers.

Additionally, Once your brand is big enough, it will be exposed to many kinds of online threats. This is the point where you should consider using brand monitoring and protection methods.