Social Media Monitoring: 10 Essential Social Media Listening Tools
Written by Tisho A Richardson   
Monday, 30 August 2010 00:37
Social Media is all the rage of marketing these days. The prospect of reaching millions of potential customers has intrigued small businesses and fortune 500 companies alike. In a recent Time Magazine article, it was reported that multi-billion Mega company Pepsi Cola traded in its Primetime Super Bowl Ad for a Social Media Marketing campaign. This is no small feat by any chance, since Pepsi has advertised during the Super Bowl for 23 consecutive years.

By now you are wondering why Pepsi would skip the chance to advertise during the single largest sporting event, Simple “the bottom line” The Super Bowl attracts about 100,000,000 viewers with a price tag of around 2.3 to 3 million dollars. An advertising campaign featuring Facebook and Twitter can reach out to around 250,000,000 with a significantly smaller budget and this is not counting the 100’s Social Media Platforms that are available.

The key to success in social media is “Listening” Everyone says it, but how is it actually. The answer is Social Media listening tools. What are Social Media Monitoring Tools? They are tools specially designed to keep tabs on what people are saying about you, your brand or product across multiple Social Media Platforms.

Below are a few Monitoring tools that will help to keep your Social Media marketing on the right track.

1. Radian 6:  Gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.  Founded in 2006, Radian6 was created with the idea that companies need to be listening to the social web in order to effectively participate. Intelligence about online conversations is critical: companies need to know what’s being said about their brand, industry, and competitors online.  A bit pricey at $600 monthly, but companies such as Dell, Microsoft Pepsi, AMD, 3M among others have seen the value of this awesome Social Media listening and Engagement tool.

2. Social Mention: Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the Social Web into a single stream of information. Social Mention is Free, sacrifices a bit of functionally but well worth exploring.

3. Viral Heat: A social measurement platform designed with simplicity and ease in mind. Built from the ground up to be timely and efficient, Viralheat allows users to easily comprehend social media. Viralheat aims to be a one stop shop for understanding social media. Today, Viralheat covers hundreds of viral video destination sites, Twitter, and millions blogs & websites. Similar to Radian many aspects as far as conversation analysis concerned. What’s missing is the engagement dashboard, the ability applied what you have listen.  Companies such as Disney, HP, TIVO, eBay, MTV, Coca Cola and among other’s have seen the value of Viral Heat. With a starting point of $9.99 monthly, this is a great tool for entry level users.

4. Google Alerts: The Google Alerts is a content monitoring service, offered by the search engine company Google that automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, and video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google Alerts service. Free tool from the masters of the search engine Universe.


5. Google Trends: A public web facility of Google Inc. that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. It is possible to refine the main graph by region and time period. Another great free tool from the masters of the search engine Universe.

6. Google Insight for Search: A service by Google similar to Google Trends providing insights into the search terms people have been entering into the Google search engine. Unlike Google Trends, Google Insights for Search provides a visual representation of regional interest on a countries map. It displays top searches and rising searches that may help with keyword research. Results can be narrowed down with categories that are displayed for each search terms. Yet another free tool from the masters of the search engine Universe.

7. Yahoo Buzz:  A community-based news article website heavily derived from Digg that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control. Users can be allowed to publish their own news stories, and link to their own or another person's site that links to a full story of the information, therefore driving traffic to that person's website and creating a larger market for sites that research and publish their own news articles and stories, such as CNN or smaller, privately owned websites.

8. Hootsuite: A website and online brand management service, which publishes to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, and WordPress. It is also a Twitter client. An added bonus is being is being able to perform keyword driven searches and also the ability to integrate with Google analytics. Free and Paid Services ranging from $4.99 to $99.99. Currently Facebook, FOX, The Martha Stewart Show and even The White House among others have seen the value of Hootsuite.

9. TweetDeck:  An Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. Users can split the program into columns which show different things, for instance tweets from friends. TweetDeck interfaces with Twitscoop, 12seconds and Stocktwits. Free desktop app very users friend and easily digested.

10. BlogPulse: is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is brought to you by Nielsen. Free web-based tool that offers some pretty good blog related insight.

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