Although the marketing community as a whole can agree that social media can make a huge impact on many businesses, and can be a crucial piece of a company’s integrated marketing strategy, it is still extremely difficult to calculate ROI through social media monitoring.  It’s hard enough to use social media tracking to follow web buzz, much less analyze the influence that buzz may or may not have on sales, leads, or brand recognition.

Lucky for us, some innovative people have developed some excellent social media monitoring tools that marketers can use (for free!) to track their brand’s (and their competitors’ brands’) mentions, influence, and recognition across the social landscape.  Here are a few of my social media tracking favorites:

• Addictomatic – A search engine that aggregates content from across several sites, including YouTube, Twitter, Bing news, WordPress, etc.
• Facepinch – A search engine for public Facebook content.  Great way to see what people are saying about your brand, and also a good reminder of how much personal Facebook content is made public.
• Foller – Provides metrics about a specific Twitter account (yours or someone else’s, as long as the account isn’t private), including topics, hashtags, @mentions, and follower information.
• Heardable – This social media tracking tool assesses companies’ “brand effectiveness” across several metrics, including “Actionable” (ADA compliance, trust marks, user interface); “Measurable” (advertising & affiliate networks, optimization tools, web analytics); “Portable” (mobile device support, mobile advertising networks); “Searchable” (inbound links, indexed pages, local relevance, SEO); “Shareable” (API support, document sharing, RSS feeds, embedded video); and “Socialable” (Digg, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube).
• It’sTrending – A social media monitoring tool that provides a real-time feed of the most shared content on Facebook, broken out by medium (video, images, news, etc.)
• Mentionmap – Provides an infographic map of a given Twitter user’s connections, mentions, etc.  Kind of a visual “7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” for Twitter.
• Metricly – Aggregates marketing campaigns (AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, etc.) onto one dashboard.
• Snip-n-Tag – Shortens URLs plus adds a Google Analytics tracking tag.
• Twitter Sentiment – Allows for the tracking of sentiment for a brand, product or topic within Twitter.
• Twittrratr – Another sentiment-based social media tracking tool for Twitter.
• Whostalking – Another multi-platform social search engine.  This social media monitoring tool’s results aren’t presented as nicely as Addictomatic’s, but, unlike Addictomatic, this tool searches Facebook.

Obvious disclaimer here: because these social media tracking tools are free to use and executed by programming, they are by no means fool-proof.  Clearly, Heardable’s assessment of “brand effectiveness” is completely subjective, and, just like your great-aunt, “sentiment” social media monitoring tools can’t necessarily detect sarcasm.  That being said, these tools provide a good foundation for figuring out where your brand stands in the social media landscape, and where there is room to improve.