Monitoring the social landscape can be a daunting task, not to mention expensive – running into thousands of dollars per month. Luckily there are a hoard of free tools available and I have selected the best in each category.
Brand Monitoring
Socialmentions gives a great overview of how a brand or name is involved socially on the web. It searches images, videos, blogs, comments etc. It also give you useful metrics such as “strength”, “sentiment”, “passion” and “reach” so you can compare brands.
Forum Monitoring
Boardtracker allows you to search forums and lets you get in on discussions. If your company is launching a new campaign, simply type what the campaign is about into Boardtracker and see what people have previously been discussing in forums and how you can get involved in the debate yourself.
Buzz
Google Trends
Google Trends is an awesome free tool that lets you monitor trends for specific key terms. You can see searches for that term by region, city and language giving you a better understanding of your audience. Within Google Trends is Trends for Websites that gives you domain specific information. Other data you have access to is top regional referrer to that domain and what other sites your visitors actually visit. This gives you a great overview of the community your audience is engaged in.
Twitter Search
The original and best. Easy to remember and simple to use. Aside from preforming a simple Twitter search about your brand, you could use more advanced search commands to discover information about competitors or simply what people are indirectly saying about you. Twittip.com has a great summary of more advanced search filters.
User Engagement
Co-Tweet
Co-Tweet has taken a different angle to Tweet Deck and HootSuite when it comes to managing multiple company Twitter accounts. This nifty piece of kit allows you to monitor brand mentions and assign tweets to other member of your team to deal with. It’s a great tool to interact with customers on a variety of e-commerce sites.
