Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Get back to basics – here are six Social Media monitoring tools to help you measure your Social Media marketing activities.

Here are six of the best free Social Media Monitoring tools to keep an active watch on both your Social Media activities and your competitors. Woody Allen may have said that 80% of success is just turning up but there is no point in having a Social Media presence if you are not going to actively update your accounts, monitor them regularly and measure engagement with your brand. Find out more about Social Media tools.

How can Social Media monitoring tools help your business?

Social Media tools can help you:

• measure the number of followers fans, likes and contacts and their level of engagement with your brand
• understand what Social Media accounts are best for your brand and how to best allocate your time and resources
• monitor your brand reputation
• identify brand advocates and influencers
• analyse your competitors and undertake market research

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here are five basic Social Media monitoring tools you should be using to help plan your Social Media marketing strategy:

Google & Yahoo Alerts

Both Google and Yahoo both provide free alerts where you can receive mentions of your brands, company, competitors or other keywords you specify emailed to you periodically. You can choose to be emailed alerts instantly (as it happens), daily or on a weekly basis. You can use these Social Media tools to monitor blogs, video sites, discussions, news updates and so forth and research these trends over a specified period of time.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a free Social Media tool where you can collect useful data about your Facebook fans and how your company page is being used. Here you can track pageviews, number of likes, people who have unsubscribed, wall posts, discussion topics, reviews, photo views, and more. In addition to the Insights Dashboard, data is also available through the Graph API. Facebook Insights is rumoured to be Facebook’s answer to Google Analytics.

YouTube Insight

YouTube Insight is a useful video analytics tool for channel owners to view detailed statistics about the audience for the videos to be able to optimise your channel. Here you can measure user engagement, track the views and popularity of videos, get a breakdown of your video demographics of the people watching your videos, discover how people found your video and even see what parts of your video holds the most interest for your audience.

Twitter Search

Twitter has a handy search function which can give you a quick snapshot of whether people are tweeting about your company or brand. You can also do an advanced query and do a search with a specified date range and even specify whether tweets had a positive or negative slant to measure the tone of the tweets. The results page auto-updates to let you monitor your searches over time even via an RSS feed.

Technorati Search

Technorati is the biggest blog Search Engine in the world. You can use Technorati search to look for blog posts or sites that matches your keywords of interest and search by different topics. By registering your site, it will show your “authority” which is the number of blogs linking to your web site in the last six months. The higher the authority of your blog, the more credible and trustworthy it is to readers.

Google Analytics

This is one of the most popular Social Media monitoring tools and can be used to monitor how people are engaging with your Social Media accounts. You can use Google Analytics to analyse your traffic, referring sites and bounce rates. You can also use this information to assess which Social Media accounts are more relevant to your business, evaluate your content and understand how to best plan your Social Media strategy.

Like any part of your marketing strategy, measurement of Social Media is important for setting measurable goals and tracking your success over time as well as online reputation management. Although there is no shortage of free Social Media monitoring tools and solutions, these are the basic tools that you should be using to monitor the main Social Networking sites.

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