In an ROI-driven world, sometimes it's hard to justify the time spent on effectively working on social media. Although the experts agree that thoughtfully planned and executed social media enhances brand recognition and engages customers, it's been hard to get a handle on whether these efforts are paying off, especially for smaller businesses with a lot more on their plate than updating their Twitter feed.

Enter SumAll, an analytics tool specifically designed for small and midsized businesses to visually compare data across all the social media platforms they're using – and to connect the dots between their social media efforts and the bottom line.

Using the tagline of “We're big data for small business,” SumAll, launched a year ago by CEO Dane Atkinson, links a company's social media activity with metrics such as Web traffic and revenue to reveal the ROI of these efforts. And the tool's platform comparison doesn't stop at Facebook and Twitter—SumAll recently added Instagram, the smartphone photoshare service, to its other 12 data sets it can integrate with, measured against their purchase transaction and Web traffic data. The data sources also include Google Analytics, eBay, PayPal and Shopify.

Go to SumAll's cheeky, succinct website for a look at how these measurable are visualized in clear, easy to read graphics. Say that you ran a promotion on Twitter. The SumAll chart will compare your Google Analytics data with your Twitter data to determine how much traffic your tweets really directed. You can track your activity daily or weekly to determine what's working and what isn't, and make changes on the fly – invaluable in the turn-on-a-dime social media world.

There's also a SumAll mobile app for your iPhone or Android.

With more than 14,000 current users, the product, still in the beta phase, seems to be skewing toward Gen Y entrepreneurs heading very small businesses. SumAll's business philosophy reflects its audience—the company has allocated 10 percent of its ownership to a nonprofit called SumAll.org, “a charter directed to do social good managed by the SumAll team.”

Best of all? SumAll's basic service will remain free, although in the future the company will offer a premium paid service that will include deeper analysis of data sets, additional filters and correlation of multiple data sets.

What I find most impressive about SumAll – besides the free element – is its clarity and ease of use. If it's simple enough for an artist selling beads on Etsy to track, it's surely simple enough for an insurance agent to navigate.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Special Reports /

Toops Scoops: New Tech Tool Connects the Dots Between Social Media and ROI

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