In social media management, learning about your audience – listening to what they say about you, your competitors, and the market as a whole is the key to monitoring your social accounts. If you are a social media rookie, here’s a list of the top free social media monitoring tools that is very handy, and one that suits what you need best. However, keep in mind that these tools cannot replace enterprise-level tools as it offers a much higher variety of services, functionality, and in-depth analysis. It all depends on your needs.
1) Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best free social media management and listening tool available. It covers multiple social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+. It has weekly reports, has functionalities such as delegating tasks, sending private messages, scheduling posts – all can be very useful when you’ve got one person to handle various social media accounts
2) TweetReach
TweetReach is a great monitoring tool if you want to check and evaluate how far your tweets travel, measuring the actual impact as well as implications of online discussions. It can help you have an idea of finding out who is your most influential followers, your advocates and company evangelists. It implicitly guides you to the right people whom you should target for them to promote your company, products and services online.
3) Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that monitors more than one hundred social media sites. It allows you to monitor what are people saying about you, your company, your products, services, or any trending topic online. It provides daily social media alerts as it monitors 100+ social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. It also monitors APIs and analysed data according to 4 categories: (a) Strength, (b) Sentiment, (c) Passion, and (d) Reach. It also provides monitoring of the top keywords, hashtags, and sites.
4) TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a free app, easy to use and the tools that are provided are great enough to get you started managing multiple accounts. Good for small or large teams, but most especially for people who are just getting into social media monitoring. There is much ease of managing accounts and scheduling. And it can also save time and resources by being able to develop a social media plan and they implement effectively using this social tool.
5) Mention
Mention is an app that helps you have real-time media monitoring, get live updates about your company, your brand from both the web and social media. It has various functionalities such as real-time monitoring, competitive analysis, find influencers, custom insights and automated reports. They offer a 14-day free trial that monitors million of sources in 42 languages.
6) Google Alerts
With Google Alerts you can monitor the web for an idea for a new content, mentions of your brand or your company, your competitors, industry leaders and so on. It is extremely easy to set up, this is social media monitoring for beginners. Google Alert will send you email notifications when Google finds new results on a particular topic you set in the Google Alert settings from across blogs, forums and news sites. You may choose the type of results you want Google Alerts to find and share with you from different categories such as News, Blogs, Video, Discussions, Books and others.
