Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

The following free tools are what I use for social media monitoring. I use them for primarily for personal brand tracking by creating searches for my name and my blogging pseudonym. They can work well for product names or very specific keywords – I wouldn’t search for simply SEO but SEO services in Toronto, for example.


Social Mention

Social mention searches through a variety of sources (blogs, social networks, etc.). You can do a search and see results directly on your site, or you can setup an alert (Social Mention Alerts) for particular searches and have the results emailed to you daily.


Google Alerts

Google Alerts allow you to setup alerts for particular searches and have them sent to your email as it happens, daily, or weekly. These alerts seem to be slower, as it is dependent on when Google indexes a page which sometimes happens the same day (like if someone blogs about you) or a few days later.


Kurrently

Kurrently searches Facebook and Twitter and pulls real time results for your search query. The “Search On” links for Google, Bing, Baidu, and Youtube just take you to searches on those sites directly instead of pulling in the live stream like it does with Facebook / Twitter.


HootSuite

HootSuite is my favorite Twitter monitoring tool. You can manage multiple accounts and setup lots of searches to keep an eye on anyone talking about a particular query on Twitter. I have written about using HootSuite for blogging on my site at (see the section about monitoring your brand).


Boardreader - Forum Search Engine

BoardReader searches queries through forums – this is hit or miss, but sometimes you can find people talking about you or your website in forums.


If the above tools don’t suit your needs, you may want to look at the following posts for more tools to try:

• http://www.dreamgrow.com/46-free-social-me...nitoring-tools/ - free tools (but the list is from 2009)
• http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-social-me...ce-and-results/ - mix of free and paid tools
• http://www.dailybloggr.com/2010/03/social-...nalytics-tools/ - mix of free and paid tools
• http://www.dailybloggr.com/2009/08/9-free-...f-your-website/ - mix of free and paid tools
• http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/11-free...a-optimization/ - mix of free and paid tools

Plus, if you find out the free tools are just not cutting it, these are recommended paid monitoring services:

• Trackur
• Radian6
• Spiral16