Nowadays, Facebook and Twitter are the biggest two social media giants and their domination is expected to be remain unbeatable on 2013. However, most people (and companies) do not really know how to monitor or measure the brand’s social media engagement with their customers.
However, there are tools out there for monitoring social media, but which are the best ones? Here are some of our selections of the best social media monitoring tools:
1. Addictomatic
Addictomatic searches a variety social media sites and networks, such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and WordPress. Moreover, the tool lists the main search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. For some queries, however, the accuracy of the results differ from the amount of scanned pages. Still, Addictomatic provides a good first introduction and overview.
2. Backtype
Backtype measures the impact of a particular online article. The user enters the articles URL into the search field and will get a graphical analyses and a performance analyses (clicks, tweets, comments, likes etc.). Rough data preparation is free, but there is a charge for more detailed data.
3. BoardTracker
Most monitoring tools ignore forums, especially in favor of Facebook or other social media. However, BoardTracker is designed for the monitoring of forums – and there it works quite reliably.
4. Compete
Compete compares the traffic of up to three web pages, so you can quickly see where you stand in comparison to your competitors. The charts, however, are not very precise but still reliable.
5. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is probably the best known and most widely used monitoring tool. Free unlimited monitoring of searches, blogs, websites, videos and other channels. Whenever your search term shows up, you get an email with the appropriate link to the site.
6. Google Trends
7. HootSuite
HootSuite reminds layout-wise of a typical Tweet-Deck. It provides a simple introduction to the monitoring of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare and multiple individual users can be monitored (including Facebook fan pages).
8. Socialmention
Socialmention is a cool tool that offers several search options for its users and a total of over 80 different networks and channels can be scanned. Despite this functionality, the tool is completely free.