Monitoring Tools

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Courtesy of Optify.net

 

10 Great Social Media Monitoring Tools

With all the different channels for social media, social media, PR, and marketing managers need single-point tools to help keep track of all their activity.  These tools are known as Social Media Monitoring (SMM) tools.  The strong ones not only consolidate disparate apps and channels, but also track and measure social media visibility and trends.   Many a few of these tools are free at some basic level.  Here is a roundup of my top favorite free social media monitoring websites.

  1. Social Mention
    Social Mention allows you to choose which platform you want to search a keyword across.  You can choose among blogs, microblogs, images, events, news, videos, audio and more.  The tool includes a vast amount of statistics about the search in addition to actual search result with statistics that include the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral), top keywords, top users, Postrank rankings, and sources.
  2. ReputationTool 
    ReputationTool is 100% free.  It’s focus is solely on a very user-friendly, reputation reporting capability.  The only thing is it’s German-built, so you have to rely on Google Translate a bit.
  3. Technorati
    Technorati is the largest blog monitoring service. Once you register your blog on Technorati, it tracks any blogs that reference your posts. To sign up for alerts, just search for your blog, then subscribe to the RSS feed.
  4. Rankur
    The basic level of this service supports social media and news / blogs.  For a reasonable monthly upgrade, users get more metrics and reputation management.
  5. HootSuite
    Gaining massive user adoption, Hootsuite works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace and WordPress.  It allows you to easily track all of your accounts, including @mentions on Twitter, which is very useful.
  6. BoardTracker
    With this tool you can set up keywords to track, choose your preferences, and have the results e-mailed to you. It allows you to run searches on topics/keywords that are being discussed in forums or discussion boards.  It can also tell you who is contributing to which topics and ranks them in order of frequency.
  7. Monitter
    Monitter is a real time, live Twitter monitor that allows you to enter up to three keywords and monitor (or “monitter”) what is being said.
  8. Addictomatic
    Addictomatic allows you to create a personalized tracking page and pulls content from all over the Internet including, but not limited to Google, Yahoo, Technorati, YouTube, TFlickr, Blinkx, Ice Rocket, Digg and others.
  9. Klout
    Klout measures influence on topics from across different social media platforms. It allows you to track the impact of your links, recommendations, and options across a variety of social media platforms.
  10. Google Alerts
    And of course, the tried-and-true.  Google Alerts are e-mailed (or you can subscribe to the RSS feed) alerts of Google results.
The Ken Burbary Wiki offers a constantly updated comprehensive list of SMMs.