Feeling overwhelmed by the tsunami of social media to-do’s coming your way daily? From new sites and services to check out, to new tips and resources to help you use social media better, there is a lot to keep up with. Even though you can probably ignore most of the noise, you really should pay attention to what your customers are saying about you online.
To help marketers listen to what’s being said about their brand or industry online, I’ve borrowed from this BNET.com list of social media monitoring tools so you can go beyond Google Alerts for tracking your online reputation. Try them out for yourself, and find the combination that works best for you. And, if you have your own tools to share with our readers, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below!
This service is a staple for monitoring social media, so if you aren’t using it yet, you really should check it out. You can use this tool to search for and sort mentions by keywords, hashtags, and more.
Search through blogs, forums, images and microblogs to find anything and everything that’s been said about you or your industry.
SocialMention crawls through blogs, comments, news articles and even videos and provides metrics for the keywords you select.
This is a bit pricey, but you can try the service out for free for a limited time to see if you like it. If someone has mentioned you on Twitter, Digg, Flickr or blogs, Trackur will find it.
Topsy offers a powerful real-time social search engine, and it just added Google+ to its roster of networks to track.
The ever-handy Klout lets you see how strong your social media influence is, as well as that of your competitors.
Image by Flickr user Arrae Creative (Creative Commons)
