100 Social Media | Planning your Social Media Strategy | How to Measure Success of the Goal | Altmetrics

Similar to the way traditional academic outputs are measured by citations, which contribute to a calculated h-index, impact through social media is measured by Altmetrics. Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that report who is talking about and engaging with your research online. Altmetrics are used by institutions, researchers, publishers and funders to track impacts.

Altmetric is a service that tracks your altmetrics. You can also track the reach of your work through using URL trackers for resources you share on the web. Bitly and other URL trackers, assign a specific, unique URL to an existing URL to track how that URL is shared over time. If you wanted to compare sharing a link to your latest publication on Twitter vs. LinkedIn, you can create a unique URL to share on each platform and then compare the website traffic from each of those links to your website.