Blog courtesy of Bridge Global Strategies

There was a time when social media relations was thought to be the sole dominion of major brands with massive marketing machines, producing a constant flood of social content, fan competitions and crowdsourcing campaigns. But the growing popularity and influence of sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest has not gone unnoticed by startups and small businesses. In fact, in a recent STAPLES study which asked small biz marketing entrepreneurs to make a “wish list,” amassing Facebook friends topped the list, ranking above traditional marketing tools such as celebrity endorsement and Super Bowl ads.

Despite this social media fever pitch, however, many people are still uncertain about how to measure and evaluate their activities on these channels. Many modern public relations agencies have augmented their traditional media monitoring techniques—which measures exposure in print and broadcast media—by adopting new tools and techniques to measure social media activities.

Many of the popular social media analytics tools require an investment, but for the budget-conscious small biz entrepreneur, there are also many free tools that you can leverage to gain insights about your performance. Here are a few that we recommend:

Tweet Reach:
This free tool allows you to measure the reach of your brand, social media campaign, or event on Twitter. By entering a URL, Twitter handle, phrase, or hashtag, the site is able to track and analyze the success of the efforts and deliver it to you free-of-charge in the form of nice, neat reports.

Who Shared My Link:
One of the most important things when sharing content online is to track who shared it and through which social media outlet. This tool, provided by Muck Rack, allows you to input a URL, and in return, it provides you with information about how the URL has been distributed, including what social media outlets were used to share it, how many times, and by who.

Google Social Reports:
Many people don’t realize that America’s favorite search engine also provides valuable information regarding your social media efforts. With many different features, this tool uses conversion rates to explain your social media efforts in monetary value. In addition, it allows you to see which social media outlets referred traffic to your website. You can easily track what content is most popular and which outlets consumers are using to spread the word about your brand.

Because there are so many different social media channels, and each one provides unique capabilities for marketers, there is no single one-size-fits-all monitoring tool. For small businesses looking to gain a little insight about their social media performance without adding another line item to the budget, these tools are a great starting point. If you are willing to invest a little, however, there are some great integrated solutions, such as Radian6, Trackur and Viralheat that can give you a more holistic perspective of your performance.

Regardless of which tools you are using, it’s important to realize that the data you receive is not simply a progress report, but actionable information that you can use to improve the way you are using social media to build visibility for your business and engage your audiences.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

Like what you’ve read? Follow Scott Public Relations on Facebook , Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+. For convenient blog updates, sign up for the Einsight RSS feed!