MASHABLE — Social media analytics company ViralHeat is giving away free access to a treasure trove of data from Twitter, Facebook and a number of other social properties, all housed within the site’s more than 4,000 topic-based profiles. The company’s revamped ViralHeat Social Trends offering gives users a fast and simple way to create their own auto-updating social media charts, which can be embedded as widgets elsewhere on the web, as well. Users can pull data and sentiment analysis from member-generated topic profiles spanning topics such as news, entertainment, music, sports and politics to create their own charts...

JEFF ESPOSITO.COM — Over the past month, I tasked myself with improving my employer’s monitoring and management of social media results and metrics. For the past year, we were with Radian6 and were happy, however we wanted more. The metrics that we were producing on our overall sentiment and equated net promoter score were great, problem was that they were in a vacuum. There was no benchmark against our competition and if we were going to expand our reports we’d have a number of hurdles to climb. The biggest of these hurdles was adding a sentiment to the competitors was adding a sentiment to the posts. With Radian6, adding sentiment to posts, Tweets, videos, etc. is a very manual process that took a combined 10+ hours a week to do for monitoring our brand...

TECHCRUNCH — Viralheat, the affordable social media measurement product that scours social video websites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, blogs, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on the web, is announcing a few new integrations today. You can read our initial review of the site here. Viralheat is making its platform more comprehensive by now allowing users to track mentions on Facebook...

WEB METRICS GURU — I’m currently evaluating ViralHeat and trying to make up my mind on how it fits into the Social Media Monitoring space, I had an free account for close to a week and was made aware of ViralHeat’s relaunch by Jason Falls who I saw two weeks ago at Event Camp here in NYC. Jason wrote a post last week on Viralheat Plants Stake As Affordable Social Media Monitoring Solution. Given Viralheat is a lot less expensive than any of the other Social Media Monitoring platforms I’ve reviewed -- almost anything they come up with makes them a better value for the money than the others if price were the main issue -- but it’s not as simple as that, not a black or white situation...

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLORER — The landscape of social media monitoring solutions has always had about four tiers. There’s the mostly manual but free, the entry-level business pricing (around $100 per month), the standard (about $500 per month to start) and the expensive (“research” approaches that go into the thousands per month.) While Scout Labs made a big splash a year ago with their $99 per month price point while still offering much of the same features and functionality of the more expensive options, there has still been a gap in the market. For the small (or frugal) business that wants less manual work but more features than Google Alerts or Social Mention but can’t afford $100 per month or more on social media monitoring, there is now a solid option. Viralheat launches a new set of features and pricing today that includes an entry price point of $10 per month, a "marketing professional" level of pricing at around $30 monthly and a premium/business price of $90 per month...