There are good news and bad news when it comes to controlling the social web to correspond with customers and develop brand awareness.  The good news is that 86% of professionals adopted social media.  The bad news is that 84% of survey respondents that adopted social media do not measure their programs.  What’s even worse is that 40% of them weren’t ever aware that social media ROI can be monitored.
However, there are tools that are low cost or even free that can help organizations and companies to track their social media success.  One or more of the following 5 social media monitoring tools can be used to measure how good your efforts have worked.
1. Trackur
ORM specialist Andy Beal can track almost all of the elements of online media, from Tweets and RSS feeds, blogs, to videos and images.  Trackur can not only provide you with the capability to view conversations about certain brands, but also the increase and decrease in volume of the conversations.  This alerts the users of any spikes in buzz that is from a negative event or a product launch.  Trackur can also analyze websites that mention a term that is being monitored, which allows users to decide how influential the website is.  The monthly cost for Trackur subscription starts at $18/month.
2. PostRank Analytics
Engagement Scores are provided to measure just how well parts of content can convince a user to take action, such as a comment for a blog post or an RSS view.  This monitoring tool can also show comments and messages from other sites that contribute engagement scores.  On top of the pieces of content, this free service can map out the amount of page views for websites or entire blogs per day as well as engagement activities.  The cost of tracking 5 sites is $9/month.
3. Google Alerts
A free Google tool that provide updates via email about the latest related Google search results.  Simply choose a search term and determine the search result types to be tracked (blogs, video, web, news, etc.), then select an update frequency and enter an email address.  This alert is perhaps one of the simplest ways of monitoring brand mentions for company and product names.  The Google Alerts tools can also be influenced for monitoring competitor mentions.
4. Social Mention
Like Google Alerts, it is a real time search engine that totals search results from videos, bookmarks, blogs, microblogs, as well as other social sites.  Social ranking scores are also provided based on how often the term that was searched is mentioned or the emotional response.  This data may even be gathered into an Excel spreadsheet or a CVS.
5. TechrigySM2
This software solution is specifically designed for Marketing and PR Agencies to measure and monitor social media.  Up to 5 profiles can be created of the “freemium” version and up to 1,000 search results can be stored for each query.  You will also be able to tap into and share information in a Ning powered Techrigy social network or Community of users.

Regardless whether you use a free or low cost tool to get started, it is important to monitor social media efforts and take the results back to your business goals.