You might not have heard of Agorapulse. It’s one of a new breed of social media management tools that, rather than catering for multiple networks, focuses 100% on Facebook. It’s genial founder, Emeric Ernoult, says it’s designed to be useful, easy-to-use and good value – and with clients like McDonalds and Virgin, they must be doing something right. Agorapulse exhibited at our Social CRM event in Paris last year and we’ve finally got around to trying out the app.

The basic Agorapulse dashboard (above) is designed to enable you to manage your Facebook Pages. You can publish posts, view statistics (with a selection of line charts and tables), filter and rank your fans, compare your page(s) with those of competitors, analyse fan activity and export the data.

So far so good – but the feature I really like is ROI Measurement (see below), which lets you assign values to different KPIs – e.g. engaging, clicking a link or expressing positive sentiment – and gives you an indication of what your Facebook Page is really worth to you. I’ve always been pretty sceptical of ROI-calculators for the simple reason that nobody values the same thing equally, but putting control into the hands of the user gets around this. Obviously you still have to figure out how much a click or comment is worth to you, but ifyou pay $1.30 for every click-thru from Google Adwords, you immediately have a solid figure on which value of referrals from your Facebook Page.

Agorapulse ROI Calculator - Click to enlarge

As we know, the success of most Facebook pages depends on driving engagement, so it makes sense that Agorapulse also provides a range of “Applications”, such as Contests, Quizzes, Sweepstakes and Petitions, that users can simply add to their Pages and start driving engagement. These are simple tools, but tied in with the monitoring, analytics and ROI measurement, creates a really powerful suite of features.

So how much do you pay for all this? Well, the basic tool is $14/month (Bronze Package) and that includes all the core management tools and content apps. If you want the advanced apps (quizzes etc.) and Fan analysis you’ll need to upgrade to the Gold Package. For the ROI Measurement and full configuration features you’ll need to pay up to $360/month, which seems pretty reasonable and, unlike some other Facebook management solutions, easy to calculate.

If you’re serious about your Facebook presence, Agorapulse is definitely worth looking into. From my perspective any tool that takes 1 minute to register for and 5 mins to figure out how to use – and delivers a valuable service – is a real contender.

We’re going to be doing reviews of various social media management tools over the coming weeks. In the meantime feel free to provide feedback on the tools you use – both positive and negative. [Vendors: No blatant pitches, please].

Disclosure: Agorapulse is one of Our Social Times’ sponsors. Our Next event is The Social Customer, in London on 29^th March.