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Top 10 FREE Social Media Monitoring tools

Social Media Marketing takes time and your success as a marketer depends on your strategy and perseverance. Here, in this article we talk about that part of the strategy which is the most crucial one and many a times the most ignored one- Social Media Monitoring.

Monitoring your social media initiatives will not only help you gauge the success of your campaigns and initiatives but will also help in understanding what people are saying about you. Social Media Monitoring may leave you exhausted but you will certainly relish the deep and real insights which it leaves you with. There are a lot of tools available out there, some paid and some free but here I have compiled a list of free social media monitoring tools which you can try out to kick start your monitoring activity.

We present a list of the Top 10 FREE Social Media Monitoring tools

Kurrently:It is used by many agencies. Enter your keyword and it tracks the real time mentions of it on Facebook and tweets in Twitter

HowSociable?:Enter your brand name and you get to see your brand’s most influential mentions across 25 different social platforms. Their monthly tracker comes free which keeps you updated on your visibility score. Apart from this, you can also upgrade your account to compare with your competitors, record your scores and export analytics in CSV.

Monitter: One of the most popular tools, it lets you do twitter monitoring in real time. One can also select a location for more geo-specific monitoring.

Socialmention: It claims to be ‘Google alerts’ for social media. A different offering in this is that you can also track sentiments -positive, negative and neutral. You can also set up social mention email alerts and get email alerts for the desired keyword.

Buzzref:Developed indigenously, Buzzref comprehensively breaks up the analytics of your Facebook page and helps you with detailed charts and graphs. Best part is that you can get reports for past 7days or even past 6 months. Why would you use this when you have Facebook insights for your page? Simple, to monitor your competitor’s page.

Icerocket:This tool will surely impress you. You can use it as a real time search engine to track Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and also Images. Best things about Ice Rocket are its small little additions which differentiate it from other tools, additions like the details of twitterer, option to find common followers, search links related to keyword and few others. One word to describe this tool – Bounteous.

Twazzup:Another popular Twitter monitoring tool. Twazzup is a single window to check out latest tweets about the keyword you enter, live pics, news, and influencers. It also displays a list of related keywords and a simple mouse-over them is enough to check latest tweets on them.

GoogleAlerts: Need I say anything about this? One of the most widely used tool. Get notified when a keyword selected by you is mentioned somewhere in the universe.

Addict-o-matic:Search for any term and it helps you with list of best sites for latest news, pics, etc. Best part- you can create a customized page for the keyword of your choice and get latest updates. You can choose from a platter of 24 different social platforms to aggregate results for your keyword and organize them with the help of a friendly drag-drop option in a manner you want and bookmark the same via Facebook, Stumble Upon, Delicious, or Twitter.

WhoRetweetedMe: Who Retweeted Me helps you analyze the performance of your link and gauge its estimated reach. You can also see who are the top influencers amongst the people who retweeted your link. Best thing about this is that it provides you with a retweet timeline chart through which you can see the time (ET) during which it got the most retweets and also top 20 Retweeters along with an option to thanks them by tweeting back at them.

So, make sure you pick up a right mix which suits your needs. Do share with us your thoughts after using any one of these. If you come across some other awesome tool then please feel free to share it with us.

Somesh Khandalkar

http://about.me/someshkhandalkar

http://twitter.com/#!/isomesh

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