Image by √oхέƒx™ on Flickr
How to stay on top of what your customers are saying about your business
Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, PR pros, analytics managers, brand managers, businesses, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers, journalists.
Guest post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com
If you’re going to use social media effectively for your small business, it’s important to stay on top of what’s being said about your business, your brand, and your industry. This roundup of social media monitoring tools can help you do just that.
One quick note: We’re not including HootSuite on this list, because most businesses already know about this one (and we’ve written about it many times in the past). However, if you haven’t heard of it, you should check it out: HootSuite is available in both free and paid versions and includes social media monitoring, automation, and analytics for multiple channels.
Our list contains five Twitter-specific tools, and five general tracking and analytics services that cover multiple social media platforms.
Did we miss any? What are your favorite social media monitoring tools — paid or free? Let us know in the comments!
Twitonomy: Measure mentions, reach & conversions
1Offering analytics and more, Twitonomy is a monitoring and analytics tool that lets you measure mentions, reach, and even conversions. You can track follower growth, click-throughs on your tweeted links, mentions, retweets, favorites, and more. The service is free to use — just sign in with your Twitter account and get started.
Twitter Counter: Get email updates on your stats
2Simple and straightforward: Plug in your Twitter handle on Twitter Counter and sign up to receive weekly emails containing your stats. You can also receive an email or Twitter notifications whenever your account reaches a milestone, such as a certain number of followers or tweets. The site offers paid versions with more detailed stats and analytics, starting at $17 per month.
Twazzup: Real-time updates
3A basic yet effective tool, Twazzup gives you real-time updates for your searches, including top retweeted images and links, most active top influencers, and the top 10 keywords relating to your search. You can search by company name, keyword, or hashtag.
TweetDeck: Track & search across accounts
4This multi-purpose tool lets you customize your Twitter feed as well as track and search. TweetDeck has features for monitoring multiple Twitter accounts, creating and managing custom timelines, automated searches for keywords and hashtags, sending out scheduled tweets, and more.
TweetReach: How far do your tweets travel?
5Discover the impact and implications of your brand’s social media discussions with TweetReach. This free monitoring tool shows you how far tweets travel. You can search by Twitter name, URL, hashtag, or keyword phrase and view reports that show the reach and exposure data for relevant tweets.
TwentyFeet: Set up alerts for your data
6This social tracking tool, recently acquired by online analytics firm SumAll, gives you monitoring tools and analytics for social networks, as well as other services your business uses, such as link shortener tracking. TwentyFeet aggregates your data and lets you set up email alerts, so you don’t have to keep checking your individual services.
Social Mention: Power & ease of use
7Easy to use with in-depth results, Social Mention is a social search engine that monitors and tracks more than 100 social media sites. This tool provides detailed analytics and shows your social influence across four categories: strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.
Addictomatic: Custom-track a brand or keyword
8This tool covers Twitter and more, letting you create custom pages to track mentions of any brand or keyword you’d like to follow. Addictomatic shows you “the latest buzz” on your chosen topic from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google, WordPress, Bing News, and more.
HowSociable: Track brands across social platforms
9A free account with HowSociable, another multi-platform tool, lets you track brand and business mentions on 12 different social sites, such as WordPress and Tumblr. If you want the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you’ll need the paid version with plans starting at $9 per month. One of the unique aspects of HowSociable is the analytics — you get a breakdown of scores for individual platforms, showing you which social media sites are working out best for you.
IceRocket: Prioritize your blog
10A free social media-specific search engine, Meltwater IceRocket gives you options for searching Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or all tracked platforms for your chosen keywords. If you run a blog for your business, you can also sign up to have IceRocket prioritize your blog when other people search for relevant keywords on the site. Finally, there’s a paid social media monitoring service called Meltwater Buzz that offers free trials, with pricing for premium versions available upon request.
Related
• Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business (Socialmedia.biz)
• 7 tools to monitor your competitors’ traffic (Socialmedia.biz)