In a very popular ‘Assessing social media impact’ session at SpotOn London this week, a number of social media tools were discussed. Twentyfeet cropped up (mainly due to the visibility of its automated weekly updates on free accounts) along with Klout and PeerIndex, with varying degrees of enthusiasm from participants.

The most interesting take-away for me personally was an introduction to Crowdbooster. It’s a free tool that lets you pull together statistics for one Twitter and one Facebook account. (If you want to add multiple accounts, you’ll need to pay).

The first thing I noticed after registering was the interactive graph and table that gave me a quick understanding on how well my posts had performed in the past week/month/ever. They are categorised by circle colour and size and let you know which updates were optimal.The visualisation makes it incredibly easy to gain a quick snapshot of performance, with the ability to then drill down into more detail if desired.

I have blogged previously on when social media output performs best, concluding that this really depends on each account’s individual audience and requires experimentation and usage analysis . Well, Crowdbooster does all the hard work for you and gives timing recommendations for both Twitter and Facebook based on the success of past posts. Pre-scheduling updates on both platforms is another nifty feature, with added prompts as when best to do this. An added bonus is that you can swap the image on your Facebook post with any image from the Internet, and make the default text even more engaging by adding your own caption, link name and description.

For even more detail, you can also link your bit.ly account. In doing so, the service gives  ‘content recommendations’ each morning to find the best links to curate, based on past performance. Other prompts include which followers and retweeters to engage with, based on their activity and interaction with your outputs. Finally, Crowdbooster also stores all of your follower and fan growth data in one place and there is the option to receive a daily email with updated information.

Obviously, Crowdbooster isn’t the only tool in this space and these features can be found elsewhere. However, they are not necessarily packaged together so well or offered to the user without cost. Ulimately, choosing which social media management tool to use depends upon individual need and preference but Crowdbooster does seem a sensible place to start.

(By the way, I have sent this blog post out at my optimal time so I’ll be keeping an eye on how it performs).