Want to know what people are saying about your brand or product in real – time, across blogs, social networks, twitter and the rest? There are a number of emerging free tracking tools out there that can help you.
Large scale market research / brand tracking companies such as Neilson, Millward Brown et al are expensive, and in-depth studies take time.
In comparison, free tools such as Blogpulse, Facebook Lexicon, Technorati, Google Trends / Blog Search and Summize all offer a quick reality check in a few minutes.
Some of these free blog trend or social media tracking tools are listed below. If you know of any more we’d love to hear about them. Also see our post on Brandtags, for another tool on this topic.
Blogpulse
Great for finding blogs that are talking about you, with a cool graph over time function, and conversation tracker. Owned by Neilson Buzzmetrics, but this service is still free (for now).
http://www.blogpulse.com/
Facebook Lexicon
Graphs the use of words / phrases used on wall posts, but not private messages. No ability to drill into data to generate insights, but interesting as an overall measure.
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon
Technorati
Charts use of keywords across blogs, including language options, time period, and the authority score of the blog. Check out the example for iphone over the last 90 days (below).
http://technorati.com/chart/iphone
Summize
A search engine for Twitter conversations, allows you to sign up to an RSS feed to keep on top of key words or phrases.
http://summize.com/
Google Blog Search
Reports the use of keywords in all blogs indexed, allow search refinement to date periods and provides customizable RSS alerts.
http://blogsearch.google.com/
Google Trends
Graphs search trends on words with a focus on news related websites, referencing spikes with relevant articles. Great options to drill down to regions, cities and languages, going back to 2004.
http://www.google.com/trends
Google Alerts
As SocialMark highlighted for us below (thanks Mark!), Google Alerts allows you to set up free email alerts for any word / phrase, across the spectrum of Google results (web, video, news, blogs, etc.)
http://www.google.com/alerts
Technorati Chart
Technorati-Blog-Trend-Chart
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Google alerts are also very handy and free, you can set up so that emails can be sent to your inbox, once a day, once a week or as it happens.
Mark.
Really useful, thanks Mark
I’ve added to our list above.
Jon
Hi Jon,
That’s an excellent topic,
in monitoring the most important online conversations about your brand, you’ll be better positioned to identify the most influential people in your niche, determine what topics are most important to them and then figure out the best way to bring your own company into these conversations.
Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry.
Are they building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticising your service, complaining to others about your new product launch.
Consumer Generated Media (CGM) is powerful.
Online reputation management needs to be part of the online strategy arsenal. It consists in two parts.
1) Identifying
2) Acting
For the “Identifying” you need to understand – What to track?
(company name, product variations, key executives, competitors)
Forums tracker
- http://boardtracker.com/
Discussions
-http://www.omgili.com/
-http://reputation.distilled.co.uk/
Your competitor page
-http://watchthatpage.com/
For the “acting”
be transparent, do good work, answer your legitimate critics in the same forum or through your actions.
Also Investigate facts internally before taking action – could this be a competitor spreading rumor?
Don’t create fake identities to support your position in blogs, forums and message boards you’ll be uncovered.
Cheers
Lucio Ribeiro
marketingeasy.net
Thanks Lucio. Sorry it took some time to respond (have been away). All sound advice, and thanks for the new links to tools.
Cheers, Jon
No worries mate, my pleasure
Lucio Ribeiro
Great list Lucio. Cymfony from TNS Media Intelligence is also robust social media tracking solution – toward the higher end in terms of pricing compared to the above list.
Ian
I am seaching for some idea to write in my blog… somehow come to your blog. best of luck. Eugene
hey really some useful tools , kool keep rocking man