Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
Measuring Your Online Success
Social Media can be a hard environment for people who have particular goals in mind wether commercial or otherwise, because there is simply too much info out there. And yet social media is the most complete and all encompassing resource when it comes to customer preferences. Knowing this, some social media sites such as Hyves even have large brand preference polls members can fill out and attach to their profile (on a voluntary basis). And targeted advertising on networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook is booming.
These are just some examples. The point here is that all the lifestyle information on the social web is treated more and more as a marketing resource. So: what if you want to know what people are thinking about you, your brand, market, business or competitor and you don’t want to spend money measuring it? Googling the term you’re after is just not enough. If you want to know where you stand in terms of brand awareness compared to the competition, you’d better have some tools to make it easier for you. Find some in depth search tools in this article.
Most of these sites aggregate multiple search engine results. These results are not always equally relevant depending on the technologies used. Some of the sites use algorithms to rate the results given to give an overall score for your social media presence and some combine the score / results with tips to improve your performance. Here are some known and lesser known sites and tools for you:
Multi-Site Trackers
How Sociable?
How Sociable is especially great if you want to view your impact on many different social media all in one singl screen. On the basis of it’s results it gives you a score, so you know where you stand on average. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to pick up all content. But it’s fast and free and covers many popular platforms. So visit How Sociable? and give it a go.
Addictomatic
Addictomatic is easy to use and allows you to create a page of relevant results across many social media in a few clicks. You can create as many free pages about different subjects as you like each with their own URL to revisit so you can monitor brandnames and other subjects on all the sites you see in the screenshot. Not all results are equally relevant but most are and all are good enough to have on your own free page. Visit Addictomatic to try it yourself.
Icerocket
Icerocket is a great tool. It’s simple and effective: simply enter a search term and a category (Blog, Web, Twitter, MySpace and others) and it will give relevant results. Especially good if you want to monitor MySpace. Visit Icerocket to see for your self.
Measuring Twitter Activity
Twitter Search
The most obvious tool for measuring activity and conversations on Twitter is Twitter’s very own Twitter Search. It looks like a simple search box but if you press the advanced link just below it an incredibly powerful array of search options allows you to very clearly define your search by time, location, person etc.etc. Searching Twitter has recently spawned new (semi-)sciences and scientific methods: that’s how powerful it is. So if you want to measure your brand’s impact on Twitter: start here.
Kurrently
Kurrently is a compact and to the point tool to measure recent activity on Twitter regarding your search term such as your brandname. Results are relevant but restricted in time and scope. Visit Kurrently and try it out.
Twittergrader
Hubspot ( a marketing agency) offers a number of great tools to measure how effective your social media presence is. These “graders” do just that: give you a grade or score and give you pointers by partly revealing the criteria they measure and benchmarking your performance. Twitter grader does it for Twitter but other graders for LinkedIn, social media in general etc. are also theirs. Visit Twitter Grader.
Measuring Facebook Activity
My Like Button
My LikeButton is compareable to Addictomatic but just for Facebook: it aggregates content based on your preferences and facebook friends in a single page. It then organizes this content in categories and boxes you can conveniently access, monitor and follow. Visit My Like Button to immediately see for yourself.
Measuring Blog Activity
Technorati
Technorati is a legendary place for bloggers and aggregates blogs from all over the world. You can add your own blog to be part of the equation and hopefully see your blog rise in the blogospere by claiming your blog. Or simply read their top 100 blogs to find relevant content. It seems doubtful that Technorati can remain as influential as it once was given the 126 miljoen blogs in the world (if that is even remotely the right number anymore). But it’s none the less worth a visit.
Cocomment [No longer active]
If you’ve claimed your blog on Technorati you may want to visit Cocomment which uses the Techorati blog claim technology amongst other things. CoComment is both a normal social media site with features such as groups and a social media monitoring tool. The idea is to develop a community of authoritative commenters and follow their comments and yours. coComment keeps a copy of all comments you make on the web (on blog sites, flickr , digg, full list of compatible platforms is here ). coComment displays all the conversations you’re tracking in one convenient place – it works just like an email inbox – so you can effectively follow the whole conversation.If you’re a blogger, coComment allows you to display the comments you make on other sites back on your own blog. It offers all kinds of tools and code you can add to your site such as a forum and you can use it as a sidebar while browsing. It’s a great concept but in order to receive relevant information it seems to be important to be an active member and use many of their own tools. So if you’re looking for a quick fix this is not it.
Related articles on the web
- 15 Sites To Monitor Your Brand and Internet Presence! (socialmediadudes.com)
- 5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services (mashable.com)
- 12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed (sixrevisions.com)
