Free Social Media Listening Tools

Wouldn’t you just love to know what people are saying about your business on the Internet? Whether positive or negative (or dead silence, which is not great either), understanding how your company is perceived by others is an important part of knowing how to shape your product or service to satisfy them.

Mhairi Petrovic of Out-Smarts provided this valuable list of free tools in her January newsletter so you can be your own personal fly on the wall. She has kindly offered to let me post it on my blog.

Take it away Mhairi….

One of the best ways to explore whether social media is right for your company is to listen.  Social media listening means using these tools to listen for mentions of your product or service, company, competitors and industry.  By doing so you will get a great feel for what is being said about your product or industry, how people communicate, what is appropriate – and you might even learn a thing or two.

Here are some great tools you can use:

1. General:

Google – www.google.com
Google Alerts – www.google.com/alerts – this service sends e-mails outlining Google search result for your key-phrases.
Backtype – www.backtype.com/ – search terms, follow conversations.
Social Mention – www.socialmention.com – real time social media search and analysis.
Pipl – www.pipl.com – great tool for assessing your personal brand online across multiple social networks.
Trendrr – www.trendrr.com – social and digital media tracking.

2. Twitter:

Twitter Search – http://search.twitter.com/
Monitter – http://www.monitter.com/
Tweetlater – http://www.tweetlater.com/

3. Facebook:   www.facebook.com

Facebook search – for people.
Facebook search – for keywords.
Facebook wall comments – Lexicon.

4. Blogs:

Technorati – www.technorati.com
Bloglines – www.bloglines.com/search
Ice Rocket – www.icerocket.com

Google Blog Search – http://blogsearch.google.com/

5. Video:

You Tube – www.youtube.com
Google video – http://video.google.com

6. Podcasts:

iTunes Directory – w.apple.com/itunes/download/

7. Others:

MySpace – http://search.myspace.com
LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/search

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