Many companies are turning to social-media sites to gauge the success of a new product and service. The latest activity on Facebook, Twitter, and countless other sites can reveal the public's current mood toward a new film, gadget, or celebrity, and analytics services are springing up to help companies keep track. Social-media analytics startup Viralheat, based in San Jose, CA, is now offering free, real-time access to the data it is collecting on attitudes toward particular topics or products...
...Social Trends uses this information to provide a widget that can be embedded on a blog or website showing the sentiment around particular terms. These widgets stay connected to Viralheat's data stores through an application programming interface (API) and are updated as the company collects more information. Viralheat believes the tool will be particularly useful for news sites wanting up-to-date infographics and for bloggers who want to track trends...
http://www.pixelrage.net/: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.
