10 Free Brand Monitoring Tools

Every good conversation starts with listening. Social media monitoring tools are there to help you listen to the conversation, engage, and be proactive. Too often brands tend to listen in order to respond and prevent damage control. Yet, listening goes far beyond being reactive. In order to be able to tailor our messages effectively, we really need to listen to what others are saying in terms of what they need and what they want from our brand.

Below are 10 social media monitoring tools you can use to listen to your customer’s wants and needs. (Also see this post for Twitter specific monitoring tools.)

1. SocialPointer
   SocialPointer let’s you monitor mentions of your brand on blogs, news, media, and micro-blogging sites. It also let’s you monitor keywords and let’s you do a comparative analysis between your brand and your competitors. It allows you to track, monitor, and respond in real-time.
2. SocialSeek
   Get the latest tweets, news & blogs, videos, photos, Facebook posts and more on any topic in a neat little dashboard.
3. Wildfire Social Media Monitor
   Allows you to monitor your growth trends, gauge your success against competitors in your industry, and receive alerts for comparisons you set up.
4. BoardReader
   Love this tool. It allows you to monitor multiple message boards for mentions around your brand.
5. SocialMention
   Allows you to monitor and measure you and your brand on social media channels real-time.
6. HowSociable.com
   Allows you to measure the magnitude of you or your brand online over the course of any given week. It scores you 0-10 on 36 different social sites.
7. SamePoint
   Allows you to monitor your brand’s sentiment real-time and over time. Also lets you monitor keywords.
8. SharedCount
   Allows you to see how many times a particular URL was shared on social media sites including: Facebook likes, shares, comments; tweets, plus one’s (+1), diggs, pins, LinkedIn shares, delicious bookmarks, StumbleUpon stumbles. They also have a multi-URL dashboard that’s in beta which lets you look at several URLs at once.
9. Topsy
   Topsy gives you real-time search all over the web from links, tweets, video, photos, + more. Plus it allows you to see who is an expert in your industry by looking at the amount of brand mentions.
10. NutshellMail
    Allows you to monitor, organize, and interact with all of your social networks from a consolidated email digest. It currently supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, and MySpace.

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