As the recession continues, so do cutbacks. So, we’ve listed 20 of the better (and free) online reputation monitoring tools in order to help you engage with the onslaught of social media.
With social media continuing to increase in importance for online marketers, the problem arises of measuring both metric and sentiment results. While keeping a close eye on the volume of engagement is fairly important, it comes second to understanding what users are saying about your brand or products.
As such, earmarking a chunk of budget for professional monitoring companies and technology has enormous benefits, but it can be costly, especially for smaller businesses. Thankfully there are some great free tools out there to help you make sense of things.
We suggest you check out the following if you're looking for a free buzz monitoring solution:
1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines - A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search - Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati - Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker - Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck - Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.
As always, if you think anything is missing off this list, let us know! And since this article is about FREE tools you'd have to be a real loser to add a paid product below...
Learn more...
Those who want to learn more about this subject should download our Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer's Guide which contains an assessment of this marketplace and profiles of 16 leading technology providers.
Posted 27 May 2009 10:01am by Jake Hird with 16 comments
Tags: reputation monitoring, buzz monitoring, tools
Topics: Online PR & Social Media, Social Networks & Online Communities
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Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
11:00AM on 27th May 2009
I'd add Social Mention as a good monitoring tool. Here's what they make of Econsultancy.
And yes, it's free ;-)
Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
11:09AM on 27th May 2009
Good call, thanks Andrew!
12:03PM on 27th May 2009
Thanks for the mention Jake.
I also know of a few other interesting ones, such as YackTrack (http://yacktrack.com/home) or IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/). The blog search on IceRocket is curated and pretty high quality.
Anyway, this is a very interesting market at this point, maybe we can have a chat about it these days.
Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
12:20PM on 27th May 2009
No problem Dragos.
Icerocket is actually on the list (number 9). I hadn't heard about Yacktrack until you mentioned it, but having tested it, it seems to be a bit slow and not particularly powerful (It couldn't recognise the Econsultancy URL)...
... Sure, if you want to have a talk about anything, feel free to drop me a line via our contact page.
Cheers
Jake
5:55PM on 27th May 2009
I'd also recommend Tweetmeme, and slightly weird Omgili.
SocialMention has improved its metrics and turned it into something that actually makes sense for all of us.
10:15AM on 28th May 2009
Hi Jake,
Great article. Thanks. I would add two resources to the list:
(1) BackType which is a comments search and tracking engine
(2) Newstin.com which is a multilanguage news aggregator that functions natively in 10 languages and can be combined with machine translation to track news on detailed topics from news and blog sources around the world. Not really pure buzz tracking in that it is not focussed on keyword tracking as much as detailed granular topics but more like market/segment buzz tracking on a global basis.
Cheers,
Tom
Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
11:54AM on 28th May 2009
@Gerel - I didn't really want to go too much overboard on the Twitter-tools for this list, but thanks for bringing Tweetmeme up! Maybe there's a seperate list of Twitter-monitoring tools that needs creating?
@Tom - Cheers; I hadn't come across these two until now. Like the simple interface of Backtype and both seem to function fairly well in their own fields.
1:43PM on 28th May 2009
@Jake, a Twitter tools list would be excellent too. I know of most of the tools in this article but there were a couple I didn't which I am sure to find very useful, so thanks. As with Technorati I also find http://www.blogcatalog.com/ useful for searching blogs
Editor in Chief at Econsultancy
2:27PM on 28th May 2009
@David - we've considered doing this but feel that it might just duplicate what's already out there, so I'm not sure how useful it would be, or what it would add. One of the best sources out there is on the Twitter Wiki, which lists hundreds of Twitter apps.
10:14PM on 28th May 2009
Jake - great list. Thanks for mentioning www.Samepoint.com. Samepoint offers a comprehensive social search feature and shows pos/neg words in our results.
MD at FreshNetworks
11:05PM on 28th May 2009
I like Omgili for tracking bulletin boards.
And highly recommend putting a few of these together using Yahoo Pipes. - if you don't know how, google it.
Charlie
FreshNetworks - Online Communities
11:35AM on 1st June 2009
Thanks for the great list Jake, and for all the others' comments adding to it. I'm going to be pulling these together into a 'superlist' of free listening sites in a forthcoming blog post. Cheers, Tia
2:42PM on 5th June 2009
@Chris thanks for the tip, this list is HUGE!
10:20AM on 18th June 2009
Hi Jake, thank you for mentioning surchur.com. Real time search is becoming crucial whether to journalists who mine the online data, surfers looking for the hottest topic or people monitoring their favorite topic on an ongoing basis. We've been serving up real time surch for over a year at surchur.com and we're only getting better with every passing month as we update according to customer feedback.
Monika Lorincz
monika at surchur.com
http://surchur.com/
Blog: http://blog.surchur.com/
Twitter: @surchur
Online PR/Social Media Consultant at Econsultancy
3:31PM on 30th June 2009
Good list.
It's missing one of my favourite free online monitoring tools whostalkin.com - compared to Surchur it has a poorly designed interface but it's a great aggregator scraping lots of social media (including blogs, forums, twitter, social networks etc)and news sites.
Michelle Goodall
@greenwellys
2:54AM on 21st October 2009
Last week, Phase2 Technology released Tattler on Drupal, completely open source and free to download. It can be modified by those with Drupal skills too.
http://www.tattlerapp.com