Social media monitoring tools pretty much do what they say on the tin – they monitor online conversations taking place in social media.
Here are 5 free ones to get you started.
These tools will let you check out what people are saying about you online, how they are responding to your campaign, how your latest news release is being shared or received, or even who is saying what about your ideas, products or services.
Start with just your brand or organisation name, and if that’s too broad, if it doesn’t get you the results you are after, remember that using three or four words targeted on the specific campaign, product or service you are working on right now will give you more focused results.
So let’s get listening…
1. Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/)
A dead simple tool. When you type in your keywords it grabs results from social media sites far and wide. You can choose to search every social site, or just the ones you select. You can also have alerts sent to your inbox as often as you like.
The qualitative analysis is a little shaky, plus, the site can be a little slow – there are a lot of people searching. But overall, a great way in.
2. Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts)
If you don’t use Google Alerts, you really should set it up today.
Google Alerts send you all the recently published pages on the web, straight to your inbox – based on the keywords you select. Google Alerts doesn’t give you search results from social sites (Twitter, Facebook and so on) but, in combination with social mention, you will have everything you need to keep up to speed with what people are saying about you.
PS – if you dont have Google reader, I recommend that too. Check out my business partner’s post on how to do it in three minutes flat here.
3. TweetBeep (http://tweetbeep.com/)
TweetBeep is basically Google Alerts for Twitter. You can monitor hashtags, mentions, replies from the Google account you just set up 🙂
Of course, you can do a Twitter search inside Twitter itself too.
4. Addict-o-matic (http://addictomatic.com/)
Addict-o-matic aggregates relevant search results from both social sites and RSS feeds. The user interface is clean and clear. You can personalise the results page and bookmark stuff too.
5. Blog Pulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/)
See what’s happening in the blogosphere. You can get results sent to your inbox daily. Nielsen Buzzmetrics made this. It’s good.
6. Omgili (http://omgili.com/)
This one focuses on ‘many to many’ user generated content platforms. Meaning that when you type your keywords in here you get results from forums, discussion groups, even mailing lists and answer boards.
Nice graphs too!
A final note: Steve can’t count
I just gave you 6 places to start, not 5. And there’s a hell of a lot more out there. Here’s a good list and here’s a huge one.
But don’t panic!!! Start with the above free tools and get a feel of what listening involves. Once you are ready, we’ll start to figure our who to listen to, what to listen out for, and then … what you should do about it!
