Pixelrage.net

Your ever-expanding portfolio of social media sites is undoubtedly taking a lot of your time up in the past year or so. The attractiveness of a Facebook Page, Youtube account or Twitter RSS goes without saying, but what are they actually doing for you behind the lines? Social media tracking and analytics has begun, and it will allow you to see what others are saying about you, and how they’re paying attention to what you’ve posted (since your Google Analytics account won’t!)

In the realm of social media tracking, there aren’t many contenders. Here at the office, we use both Radian6 and ViralHeat. They both serve different functions, are to be used by two different user-bases, and come with entirely different price tags.

Slim ‘Pickins for Social Media Analysis Tools

While Radian6 is your typical full-fledged corporate social media monitoring tool, it’s not exactly user-friendly out of the box, nor is it affordable at a starting price of $600 per month.

For the at-home internet marketer, ViralHeat is the more practical decision: it gives you the only tools you’ll probably ever use in a social media tracking campaign, without all of the bells and whistles that you never will. Oh, and it starts at $9.99/month with a “pay by month” system – can’t beat that, even if you wanted to do a one-month taste test.

Using ViralHeat’s $9.99 per Month Package

The low-end package with ViralHeat gives you 5 “profiles.” A profile is simply a single keyword. For instance, “3D TV,” or “Sony.” When you select one of these keywords, the system will go forth all over the internet and look at all recent activity that has used those keywords, giving you an in-depth report in the form of line charts, lists and percentages that represent activity on all social media sites. These 5 profiles can be changed or deleted at any time, making it a top choice for the stingy (I mean, thrifty) small business owner who isn’t willing to pay more per month for a larger package.

The plan includes a 7-day history chart, as does the middle-grade $29.99/mo package. This 7-day spread gives you insight into trends over the past week – a good way to measure offline media’s impact on your company or any other upcoming, trendy topic. Metrics for these charts include Google Buzz & Twitter, Facebook, realtime web (blogs) and video (Youtube + all others: MetaCafe, Vimeo, etc.)

The only downside to ViralHeat’s lowest pricing tier is that it leaves out sentiment analysis, which identifies positive and negative mentions in social media. It’s something you’ll want if you are using Facebook for your actual company or product, and are about to do a big launch. Sentiment analysis is a key part of due diligence; make sure people aren’t spreading a lot of BS around about you or your product. If they are, be there to correct it immediately.

Tracking Twitter and Google Buzz

The following screenshot shows a view of the “microblogging” dashboard on ViralHeat. It’s a mash-up of both Twitter and Google Buzz, showing both combined and separate statistics for both.

As you can see, all of the information you really need to know is included in this account: you get an overview of positive and negative Conversation Analysis, lists of top influencers (people who talk about you the most), and trends that display which day was most successful. It will help make things painfully obvious when asking “why did my traffic spike?” The bottom of the screen shows actual Tweets. They can be sorted by sentiment: positive, negative or neutral (an internal filter stuffs them into one of these three categories for your convenience).

Tracking Facebook

For Facebook social media tracking, you’ll get similar treatment with a 7-day chart and detailed statistics on what went on during the week.

There’s no doubt that the analytics provided directly with your Facebook Page is ample enough, but ViralHeat tags on additional metrics including top fans and posts, sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral) and an actual mash-up list of all Facebook posts that mention your selected keyword or company name. As with all other charts, you can export your metrics to an Excel document.

Tracking the Realtime Web

This section within your ViralHeat account acts as a general bucket for web activity, where you can track what bloggers are article writers are saying about your selected keyword.

It’s the most meager section in terms of the metrics it provides, but the real beauty in it is that it lists all of the recent backlinks that term has gotten right underneath the chart, so that you can visit them directly. They’re categorized by what country the domain is in, and each one has a “stats” link that gives you insight into what that particular page is contributing to the term.

Tracking Video Campaigns

Lastly, ViralHeat will give you insight into the world of social video sharing, and how your researched keywords or company names are being perceived on the likes of Youtube et. al.

This dashboard gives you a statistical overview, listing of the top video sites mentioning your targeted term, and the top videos related directly to them. Best of all is a mash-up of links pointing to specific videos, presented below the chart.

It saves a hell of a lot of time as opposed to visiting Youtube, Vimeo and other popular sites and searching for/weeding through results on your own. I like to think of ViralHeat’s video analysis section as a big convenience, above all else…especially since we run corporate Youtube campaigns that coincide with TV advertising.

Choosing a ViralHeat Plan

First off, ViralHeat has a free no-obligations trial so that you can actually see what you’ll be getting. I first started off with the basic $9.99/month plan when signing up, but we had the desire for sentiment analysis at the office, and upgraded to the highest $89.99/month plan.

Personally, I think that plan is overkill for any at-home business owner, as the only notable perks you’ll get are the 40 profiles and 30 day history (instead of 7). However, we have both a PR and Marketing team totaling a couple dozen employees that uses the account daily.

Is Social Media Tracking for You?

If you’re looking for the most affordable and practical way to measure social media analytics, ViralHeat is your current best  bet in terms of useful metric reporting and price.

In all, it’s not worth your while to bother with social media tracking if you’re throwing out Facebook Pages and videos for the hell of getting backlinks or casual followers, but it’s a must-have if you take it seriously and really integrate these technologies with your brand name, or to maintain relationships with your customers. You’ll WANT to see how it’s doing, otherwise, you’ll be missing out to the point where your campaign will be mediocre at best.

Until Google Analytics supports social media analysis (which I doubt, unless we’re talking about Google-sponsored social media services like Buzz, Wave and the alleged Google Me), ViralHeat is a solid contender that won’t hurt your budget.