{"id":121,"date":"2009-02-20T17:26:09","date_gmt":"2009-02-20T22:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/?p=121"},"modified":"2009-04-30T19:21:50","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T00:21:50","slug":"free-social-media-monitoring-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/free-social-media-monitoring-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Social Media Monitoring Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don’t have a big budget for Social Media Monitoring? There are many available free tools that are high-quality and offer interesting insights.\u00a0The following list\u00a0contains both Best-in-Class\u00a0solutions for monitoring as well as\u00a0specialty tools for specific purposes. If you know of one you feel should have made this list,\u00a0use the comments section at the bottom of the post, and I’ll keep this updated.<\/p>\n

Monitoring the Blogosphere \/ User Generated Content
\n<\/strong>Mainstream media lags substantially the buzz in the Blogosphere. Many people turn to blogs for news first, particularly in areas where\u00a0experts offer specific insights or are ‘untainted’ by profit motives. You can track you own company, brands, and issues, using the following services. You can also easily track your competitor’s companies, brands, and issues.<\/p>\n

Technorati <\/a> One the best known and for good reasons. Comprehensive and with\u00a0custom RSS feeds that let you get quick updates on any blog that mentions your company name.<\/p>\n

Blog Pulse (Buzzmetrics)<\/a> The free version of Buzzmetrics from Neilsen Online. It has very interesting trend and\u00a0conversation tracking tools.<\/p>\n

Google Blog Search<\/a> If a tree falls in the blog forest, it’s likely\u00a0that it will be found by Google Blog Search. Even if the blog isn\u2019t in Google news, or doesn\u2019t show in a\u00a0Google search, Google Blog Search might still find that obscure story about that competitor’s launch. You can\u00a0set up auto-alerts that will be delivered\u00a0via email or RSS.<\/p>\n

Trendpedia<\/a> has a simple interface and seems to be well-regarded.<\/p>\n

Icerocket<\/a> was recently singled out to me by some Social Media pros as strong. It has tabs at the top to easily\u00a0limit your\u00a0search to Blogs, Twitter, MySpace, etc.<\/p>\n

Boardtracker<\/a> Forums and message boards can host some of the most important conversations about your company and brands. How can you find them? Use this.<\/p>\n

Google Alerts<\/a> makes it\u00a0very simple to\u00a0keep track of the latest buzz via email. Google Alerts let you track web, blogs, news and groups for any phrase you want. You can select to receive emails daily, weekly, or \u201cas it happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

YouTube<\/a> If you think of YouTube as a search engine it would now be #2 in search! Video is the preferred learning method of many people. Maybe\u00a0your company or brand is there?<\/p>\n

Facebook Lexicon<\/a> Facebook has become so big, it\u2019s time to pay attention to the conversations that happen there. All you need is a Facebook account\u00a0to search any keyword and instantly see how often it is discussed on Facebook user’s \u201cwalls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twitter<\/strong>
\nTwitter is an animal unto itself with an avid following. You can peer into the cyclone of posts by using one of the following tools. These are just a few of the many, Twitter seems to stoke creative software solutions.<\/p>\n

Twitter Search<\/a> is Twitter’s native search engine. Just type in what you’re looking for.<\/p>\n

Tweet Scan<\/a> searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, JSON, and Twhirl.<\/p>\n

Twit Scoop<\/a> shows what’s hot on Twitter right now in a ‘cloud’ format. It has interesting search and graphing capability.<\/p>\n

Other Interesting Discovery Tools<\/strong>
\nBlogs and message boards are just part of the ‘long tail’ of the UGC web.<\/p>\n

Digg<\/a> surfaces the best stuff as voted on by their users. People collectively determine the value of content. You can use the search box to see if you rank.<\/p>\n

Stubleupon<\/a> helps you \u201cstumble\u201d around the Web and find new content. You tell the service about your professional interests or your hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them.<\/p>\n

That’s the short list of Best-in-Class\u00a0solutions. It should be enough to keep you up all night searching.\u00a0If you feel I’ve missed a key solutions,\u00a0use the comments section at the bottom of the post, and I’ll update the list.<\/p>\n

Later Additions:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s a huge master list – How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit<\/a><\/p>\n

A big list for Twitter specifically: 9 Twitter Search Apps : Better Than Twitter & Google<\/a><\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t have a big budget for Social Media Monitoring? There are many available free tools that are high-quality and offer interesting insights.\u00a0The following list\u00a0contains both Best-in-Class\u00a0solutions for monitoring as well as\u00a0specialty tools for specific purposes. If you know of one you feel should have made this list,\u00a0use the comments section at the bottom of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-digital-marketing","7":"category-integrated-marketing"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2jHqE-1X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkassociates.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}