Webnames.ca StaffMonitoring what people are saying about you or your business online is more important now than ever. Luckily, it’s also become easier than ever as more and more great Social Media monitoring tools are becoming available. There are many tools out there to choose from, but here are 5 free ones that you should be using to monitor your brand and keep tabs on your social media buzz.
Social Mention – http://socialmention.com
Social Mention is a search engine that offers real-time social media search and analysis of chosen keywords. It searches through a multitude of platforms including blogs, events, news, videos and more. It shows you the metrics around various keywords and the overall “sentiment” (positive, negative, neutral). It provides you with graphs outlining top keywords, top users, top hashtags, allowing you to monitor anything. This includes but is not limited to, your brand, the city you live in, products you use etc. You can also get code for a free keyword monitoring widget.
Plancast – http://plancast.com
Plancast lets you filter through events happening anywhere through keywords. You can subscribe to get an RSS alert on any new event that matches the keywords you select. Keep track and monitor events happening in your area, competitor events, or conferences and tweetups that you may want to attend. This is a great tool to stay ‘in the know’ in your specific field of expertise.
Watch That Page – http://watchthatpage.com
Watch That Page allows you to monitor your own page, Wikipedia, or any site for that matter. It lets you know when any new content (comments, forum posts etc.) has been posted. You’ll receive an alert the moment any changes are made. This tool will help you stay on top of all new posts to your site and react in a timely manner.
Twitaholic – http://twitaholic.com (Update: Twitaholic has since been discontinued as a service and is no longer online)
Twitaholic is a tool that lets you see where and how you rank among the other twitter users in the world, and in your own city. It gives you your basic stats and let you see the other most popular users in your geographic area. A great way to quickly see who the tastemakers are in your geographic area or other parts of the world.
Woopra – http://www.woopra.com
Woopra is a Web analytics tool that gives you data about how your users are interacting with your website. It allows you to see where the visitor came from, their location, the actions performed and then where they go next. While there is a free version of Woopra it is very limited, there are two low cost paid versions (bronze and silver starting at $4.95 per month), which will allow you to segment your visitors, and track trends over time as well as offering some customized reports.
Oh and hey, a bonus sixth one since Twitaholic is no longer online:
Socialert – Socialert.net
Socialert is a twitter analytics tool that helps to track twitter hashtags and accounts. It provides you information about users who are related to your brand. If you run a hashtag campaign for your brand socialert could track twitter metrics like reach, impressions, top tweets, and influencers related to your brand. If you track any twitter users using Socialert you can find their top tweets and users who are mentioned in their tweets. It helps to understand what your twitter competitors are doing.
If you are looking for new ways to monitor what’s being said about you and your brand online, these are some great tools to get you started!