Canadian Marketing Blog

5 Free Fantastic Social Media Monitoring Tools

Working in the social space is about more than just connecting, networking and broadcasting. You also have to listen so that you know where and how you can improve your brand's reputation. Conversations will inevitably happen with or without your involvement, so even if you’re not active in the social space, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t being talked about.

The good news is you don’t have to rush out and purchase an expensive software package to manage your social monitoring for you.

You can do it yourself… FOR FREE!

There are a number of tools available on the web to help marketers with their social media monitoring.

Check out some of these tools to help you with your listening objectives:

www.search.twitter.com
Perhaps obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people DON’T know about the Twitter search tool. Twitter search allows you to search by keyword and monitor recent tweets.

The search tool also has a “reply” option as well as a “view tweet” option, which is great for presentations and social media monitoring reports.

www.backtype.com/
Backtype is a conversation-monitoring tool that allows you to search conversations on blogs, social networks and various other social media sites so you can find out what people are saying.

The great thing about Backtype is that it extensively monitors comments on blogs, which a lot of listening tools do not.

http://boardtracker.com/
Boardtracker is a tool that allows you to monitor conversations happening on forums. I like how specific it is, especially because a lot of important conversations happen on forums. It’s an important medium that should not be overlooked.

Boardtracker recently released a 2.0 beta version, however, I would recommend using the original version FIRST, as the results may not be the same.

www.socialmention.com
Social Mention is a tool that allows you to monitor conversations happening online in virtually any social web property. It searches blogs, microblogs, forums, comments, video and more.

While I like to use this tool a lot, I don’t recommend using it as your ONLY source of monitoring. You should use it in conjunction with others. It also tends to be slow at times.

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ (or .com if you’re from the US)
Google Blog Search is a staple. It helps you find relevant blog posts and blog authors who discuss your brand and have influence on the web. It’s important to know who these people are, so that you can engage in conversation with them or at the very least, know what they are publishing about you.

So these are just a few of my favourite tools. Of course there are search tools available on practically every social site as well. I routinely scour Digg, BlogCatalog, YouTube, and Facebook during my monitoring programs, in addition to the ones mentioned above. It's all about using the tools that you are comfortable with, that give you the best results.

Have fun out there!

Thanks for the list, Selina Jane. All are great resources. I've added a few more to your list over at my blog.

Check it out at:

http://www.davehaber.ca/interactive-objectives-blog/2009/10/19/four-more-free-fantastic-social-media-monitoring-tools.html

Thanks,

Dave

Here is another one: http://twapperkeeper.com/

It allows you to archive and organize tweets based on hashtags.

One more to add to the list. http://sm2.techrigy.com

Our freemium service allows 5 keywords and 1000 results (that you can delete and get more) for 0 cost.

I would comment that Social Networking is probably the most widely known Web 2.0 term. From MySpace to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other similar sites, the focus of social networking is to connect you with others – your friends, people with similar interests, potential employers, and then give you the opportunity to find more connections as your profile grows.

Thanks Dave!!! Appreciate the post.

All of these are great suggestions. I've bookmarked them all.

If you think of any others keep em rollin' in.

Another useful - and free - tool is blogscope.net, a search engine for the blogosphere. Blogscope is power by Sysomos, which also offered two fee-based services: Heartbeat (social media monitoring/measurement) and MAP (social media analytics and reporting).

Interesting post. I read a review of some of these tools (and some others not mentioned in your post) recently here: http://mediameasurement.yolasite.com/blog.php

Tweetbeep.com is great to be notified of specific key phrases used when others Tweet.

Good! I have never used any tool for social media but after testing a few ones I think it's going to become very intresting for me..thanks for creating interest,

Hi there,

Could you please review my new social media monitoring tool. I have just released the first BETA version of this free social media monitoring service. This free SMM / SEO tool will crawl the top 20 social media websites for your URL exposure and will make an online profile. Although I hope you just want to review it, it could be good for SEO too as it contains a backlink to your website .

Please testdrive it yourself at http://www.socialwebsiteanalyzer.com

Thanks in advance and please reply as to your thoughts on this.

Erwin

Thanks for sharing such useful information. I was looking for social media monitoring tools and your blogpost has given enough information to end my search here. I was using some of these tools but maximum tools that you have mentioned here are new to me

Free app that allows you to control your Social Networks Among other Portals. Great tool Http://www.downloadtrillian.com