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20 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools to Find Your Brand’s Social Mentions
By Steve Farnsworth (@Steveology)
NOTE: I am working on an update of this list. Please leave a comment or send me a message of what resources you would add and which ones are no longer useful. Thanks, Steve
When I’m working on a small or pro-bono project I often use one or more of these tools for tracking online brand mentions. You should know that you get what you pay for. Depending on the tool, some are hit or miss.
Free social media listening tools are like the fruit fly of the social media world. They are born, live, and die in short order. With only a few exceptions, their results can be spotty and the tools can stop working at any time. There is a lot of overlap in this list, and for good reason. Your mileage may vary, but you have been forewarned.
If you are implementing a fully committed social media program at your company, then I strongly encourage you to bite the bullet, be a big kid, and pay for a full featured social media monitoring tool. However, if you need a quick and dirty free social media listening tool, here are a few to choose from.
I will publish updated versions of this post in the future. Please leave a comment with your thoughts, suggestions, and feedback for future versions.
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| Resource | Tracks | RSS Feed |
| Google Alerts | News, Web, Blogs, Microblogs, Images, Video | Yes |
| Social Mention | News, Web, Blogs, Microblogs, Images, Video | Yes |
| Boardtracker | Discussion Boards | Yes |
| Monitor This | News, Web, Blogs, Microblogs, Images, Video | |
| Spy | News, Web, Blogs, Microblogs, Images, Video | Yes |
| Twitter (Advanced Search) | Yes | |
| Icerocket | Blogs, News, Web | Yes |
| Google Video (Advanced Search) | Video | Yes |
| Blogpulse | Blogs | |
| Backtype | Blog Comments | |
| Digg | Digg | Yes |
| Yahoo News | News | Yes |
| Metacafe | Video | Yes |
| Page2RSS | Adds an RSS to a specific web page | Yes |
| Delicious | Delicious | |
| Bing | Web | Yes |
| Wikipedia | Wikipedia | |
| Social Media Firehose (Yahoo Pipes) | This is a powerful social media search for company and brand mentions on a bunch of social media sites, including flickr, YouTube, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, WordPress, FeedBurner, and more | Yes |
| Conventional and Social Media Tracker (Yahoo Pipes) | Searches multiple blog and social media search engines | Yes |
| Social Site Submission Watch Dog (Yahoo Pipes) | Searches for your URL if it’s submitted to Digg and Reddit | Yes |
Copyright 2010 Steve Farnsworth
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March 16, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Nice work, Steve. Great tools for small businesses – or even for individuals looking to keep an eye on what is being said about them “out there”. Definitely worth a bookmark (Delicious of course)
March 17, 2010 at 4:23 am
Hey Steve, great and helpful list. Another popular free service for MessageBoards / Forums is http://www.boardreader.com. Might be worth checking out.
March 17, 2010 at 11:24 am
Nice~! Just posted a blog yesterday about the importance of tracking…and how beneficial it can be to your brand…but your list is SUPER.
Thank you~!
March 18, 2010 at 6:10 am
I have a few to add:
* Pipl
* Board Reader
* Twendz
* Technorati
* Google blog search
* Website grader
* Twitter grader
* Compete
* Site volume
* Popuri
* Social meter
That’s all.
http://twitter.com/ginidietrich
March 19, 2010 at 1:32 pm
[...] With that said, someone in your PR and marketing areas should still be monitoring your social media presence on a regular basis. In addition to the paid services, there are many free services to help you monitor your social media mentions, which have been detailed by Steve here: 20 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools to Find Your Brand’s Social Mentions. [...]
April 2, 2010 at 2:32 am
Wow this list has really helped me. Thanks Steve.
I was wondering what the best way to track when my URL has been linked into a blog post/news article is. Can anyone recommend somewhere that will provide an RSS feed for this?
April 6, 2010 at 9:17 am
[...] 8) Twenty Free Social Media Monitoring Tools To Find Your Brand’s Social Mentions [...]
May 24, 2010 at 9:32 am
[...] with social media? If you can’t readily answer this question, you may want to do some basic social media listening first to understand if there people who are discussing your brand have customer service questions, [...]
May 31, 2010 at 1:36 am
Hey Steve,
I also made an entry on free social media moniroting tools. You might be interested:
http://www.social-brand-value.com/2010/05/31/free-social-media-monitoring-tools-list/
Cheers
Daniel
July 21, 2010 at 4:38 am
Thanks for listing out all the resources. I was looking for social media monitoring tools and this is really helpful.
July 23, 2010 at 5:22 am
Ummm lots of useful tools here will keep me buy
August 23, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Hi Steve – for your updated list I would add addictomatic (don’t let the name put you off!)- only came across it myself over the weekend and thought it was very cool! Cheers, Andrew (@AndrewPere)
August 23, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Thanks Andrew! I do know it, and you are not the first to recommend it be on this list. Originally, I didn’t include it becuase it does not have an RSS feed, and I felt that other options on this list covered the same ground. Can you tell me what makes it special to you?