3 Free Tools for Social Media Monitoring/Listening
A good reputation is key to running a successful business. But in today’s world of dozens of social networks, thousands of blogs, and millions of individual content creators, how do you keep track of what’s being said about you?
Set Up Alerts with Free Social Listening Tools
You may already be manually monitoring websites that are key to your business (such as your Yelp, Facebook, and/or TripAdvisor page), but you need to have a plan for monitoring across more than just a few platforms. These are a few of the tools that I like to recommend to my clients that are (a) easy to use, (b) give you a wide cross-section of sites to monitor, and (c) free.
Mention
Tracking most of the major social media sites, forums, and review sites, Mention is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to collaborate with your team and keep all of your social mentions in one dashboard. (Feeds can also be exported via RSS). While they have several different levels of paid accounts for those who may have a higher volume of social chatter about their brands, products, competitors, and keywords, the basic (250 mentions/month) package is free.
IceRocket
An easy-to-use site for searching blog mentions of your brand or other keywords, IceRocket from Meltwater is a great, stripped down resource. Like Mention, you can export your searches as an RSS so that you can keep tabs of those referrals to your keywords on an ongoing basis without having to constantly go back to the website and type them in.
Google Alerts
This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned Google’s free Alerts product on this blog, and that’s for good reason. This simple, email-driven alert system can be customized to send you emails immediately, once a day, or once a week, to let you know about any new web content indexed by Google that includes any of your search terms. In addition to being useful for monitoring your own brand, products, and competitors, it can also be useful for keeping tabs on industry news by following industry-specific keywords.
Final tip: If you want to keep all of these new RSS feeds in one place, I recommend an RSS aggregator like Feedly that can serve as a home-base for all of these different pieces of information. It can also aggregate the blog feeds of your competitors, industry influencers, and news sources.