Cost-effective tools to enhance your Social Media campaigns

The most critical component to establish once you’ve kick started your social media activity, is what type of activity to measure. This will help you make an assessment on what type of tool to select to help with this process.

We’ve got a few ideas:

• Reach. Consider measuring the number of fans, followers, blog subscribers and other statistics to gauge the size of your community
• Engagement simply defined equals  retweets, comments, average time on site, bounce rate, clicks, video views, white paper downloads and anything else that requires the user to engage
• Competitive data. Size up the opposition. Look at your own brand’s “share of voice” across the web or number of competitors’ brand mentions. Free tool Social Mention can help with this
• Sentiment. You might want to measure the numbers of mentions with positive, negative or neutral sentiment
• Sales conversions. Do you want to measure social media referral traffic to the top of the sales funnel or number of sales attributable to social media efforts?

Many of the lower-cost tools include some sort of Google Alert integration, such as Google Alerts which can quickly identify brand mentions across the web

Here’s our run down of several great cost-effective tools:

#1: Sprout Social—Social Media Management

Sprout Social is a well-priced tool that can effectively help manage and monitor your company profiles across the. The $39 standard plan includes the management of up to 10 profiles, the ability to publish and schedule messages and some monitoring capability. If you are looking for any type of share of voice brand metrics across your industry, this is not the tool for you.

If you’re on the go, they have robust mobile versions of Sprout Social for iPhone and Android.

In terms of listening for or monitoring your brand terms, they only dish up results from Twitter and Facebook.

However, they also offer a feature called Web Alerts that acts as a way to monitor brand or company mentions from sources other than social media. Sources include blogs, news sites and other content sources. Additonally, Sprout Social’s Web Alert feature allows brands to track mentions across sources outside pure social media.

Be sure to check out the Sprout Social blog.

#2: Viralheat—Social Media Simplified

Viralheat has a fairly sophisticated monitoring and management interface, and a price that most businesses can afford.

The $49.99 monthly plan allows businesses to manage 15 social accounts and monitor 2 search profiles across Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, video and the web.

One key unique selling point is the tracking of individual products and comparing social buzz among one’s own products or comparing brand mentions to competitors’. Very handy indeed, as otherwise a fairly labour-intensive job.

Viralheat’s Compare feature allows brands to compare their overall brand mentions to their competitors’, and the ability to export this data as a pie chart.