With the emergence of Social Media, monitoring your online presence has become quite a concern for the big brand owners. Its is very important to pay close attention to what people are discussing about your brand in the social media platforms. This not only holds true for managing your reputation but for multitude of purposes like discovering new business opportunities, tracking upcoming customer trends, monitoring competitors buzz, identifying new keywords etc. There are so many social media channels for people to discuss about your brand; since internet is becoming increasingly transparent keeping a track of them is essential for an organizational point of view. Here are few free tools that I have been using to make monitoring easier:
Social Mention
Social mention is a real time social search platform that tracks the mentions of your brand across the internet. It includes user generated contents, conversations like blogs, discussions and tweets, videos, images, bookmarks etc. Just type in your company name or keywords. I personally prefer Social Mention as it is the most mature monitoring platform which can provide you with a complete summary about our brand with details like strength, sentiment, reach and passion. You can also set up free E-Mail alerts for your keywords (similar to Google alerts).
How Sociable:
I also use ‘How sociable’ monitoring because of its simplicity. It can be used to find out how visible your brand is online, all you have to do is to type in your keywords and it gives you a detailed visibility score of your brand across 32 social media sites. Howsociable helps you to know where on the web our brand is strongest and what the awaiting opportunities are. It can also act as a benchmark for your brand and can be used to keep track of your competitors. You can also receive your reports through E-mail.
Whostalkin:
Whostalkin tracks over 60 social media sites to provide you with a comprehensive search result list on who is talking about your brand on the online space. It is one of the quickest ways of monitoring your brand, but it lacks some essential features which is there in other monitoring sites. Whostalkin doesn’t provide you a complete analysis, but it does provide valuable, fast , and accurate information.
Google Alerts:
Google Alerts automatically sends us updates of our keywords via mail. You can essentially set an unlimited number of keywords. Google alerts can be used to track your brand, keyword or competitors.
Google Blog Search:
Google Blog Search lets you scan the blogosphere for relevant blogs which is mentioning our brand name. Since it displays search results only for blogs, they give us a good idea on how Google ranks our blogs for the keywords that is being searched for. I use ‘blogsearch’ for customizing or updating the blogs with more content as per the indexing patterns of Google. One additional feature of blogsearch is the sort by date option.
Addict-O-Matic:
Addictomatic is considered as one of the coolest web monitoring solutions. It is quite popular amongst the users because of its interesting look and a web 2.0 feel. Main reason I added this to the list is because it simplifies our search results in one screen by letting you create a custom page. The results will be displayed in individual boxes which represents various social media sites all in a single screen.
Keeping a track of your brand name can be a tedious process, but if done effectively it can yield high results
on
The only social media monitoring tool I use is Google Alerts. After reading your article, I think I will try out the other ones mentioned here.
on
Again another list of resources I had no idea about. Thanks again for all the helpful tips, definitely book marking this page.
on
Great Mahesh, Like we monitor our website on a regular basis, it's a must to check / evaluate our social media status. The tools mentioned herein will help us a lot to know more about the performance of our social media and act accordingly. This definetely save us lot of time and get us accurate results !
on
All the tools you have mentioned are quite amazing for detecting the online presence among the Social Media Arena.. Found social mention.com and whostalkin.com really good for checking the social activities..