Lists You Shouldn't Miss: Social Media Monitoring for Anyone

Social media has become part of everyone’s daily life.  This is how I started my previous blog post on Social Media Monitoring for Enterprises and the statement still, and most likely always will, stand true.  The desire to stay connecting and share life experiences, moment by moment, is something we can’t deny.  The power that comes with social media is the ability for anyone, anywhere to utilize it to spread a message.  What you say can be seen my millions of people around the world, even if you set some privacy settings.  This may seem like a disturbing reality but I see it as a wonderful opportunity.  To be able to communicate with people all around the world in such an easy and quick way enables us to really collaborate.  However, often times you want to be careful as to what you publish to the web because of the open exposure.  Social media monitoring doesn’t have to be only for enterprises tracking their brand and conversations around their company, it can be a way for anyone to see what conversations are going on about them and what they care about.

The following is a list of free tools that anyone can use to monitor any type of buzz, conversations or messages about a person/topic on social media.

1. 1. Tweetdeck and Hootsuite Simple to use, you can monitor and manage multiple social media accounts all in one place with the ability to schedule tweets, create filters for only certain topic updates, research trends and hot topics for your industry, analyze social media traffic and impact, and have more engagement ability with specialized posting.
   2. Twuffer, Twitterstats Twitter tools to both schedule tweets and see the changes with your follower base (increasing or decreasing).
   3. Twithawk, Twilert, Monitter All three of these tools send updates when there is mention about a specified topic or person on social media: good for monitoring your own name mentions or specific topics of interest.
   4. Twitterfall For popular trends, Twitter is queried from the Twitterfall server, and results are streamed directly to you.
   5. Social Mention Similar to Twithawk and Twilert, this tool scans all social media for mentions about a specified keyword, name or topic and sends alerts when there is any talk about those searches.
   6. Klout This is a fun tool to determine your social media influence, designed to encourage more engagement online and through social media.  Based off your number ranking, you can potentially earn free prizes and awards.
   7. OpenBook Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.  Now, even if they are not your friends and you don’t know them, you cans till read people’s recent posts (based on their own words).
   8. Google Alerts
      Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries.
   9. Guzzle Guzzle reads hundreds of feeds every second to get you the latest news about stuff you care about.
   10. Social Seek Socialseek is for anyone looking to rise above the social media noise and finally get real engagement and social media ROI

Some other manual free searches can be found here: http://www.socialbrite.org/2011/01/11/guide-to-free-social-media-monitoring-tools/

Knowing what’s happening in the world can be very powerful and enlightening.  By monitoring yourself or the topics you care about on social media, you can potentially be better informed about what the conversations are and how to push yourself, your knowledge, and your personal brand, to the next level.