These days, most companies don’t have the luxury of spending thousands of dollars a month on tools to monitor and report on Consumer Generated Media (CGM) about their brand. But that’s what it costs for the leading, comprehensive social media monitoring tools.
And if you can afford it, they’re awfully impressive and useful, allowing you to do things like:
- Monitor multiple platforms (blogs, micro-blogs like Twitter, news outlets, forums, message boards, even Facebook)
- Count posts and mentions in aggregate and in detail, and review each post
- Analyze topics
- Assess tone (sentiment analysis)
- Generate custom reports by timeframe, with the ability to export data
You’ve probably heard of some of them – tools like Radian6, Lithium, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Sysomos’ Heartbeat, and Collective Intellect to name a few. But impressive capabilities come with impressive price tags. And though there are “starter packages,” they typically offer very limited search capabilities.
Since many companies don’t know where to start, why not experiment with some freebies for awhile to get your feet wet? Many people begin with something as simple as Google Alerts, which tracks news from several sources based on search terms, and emails the results (in real-time, daily or weekly). However, there are literally hundreds of free or low-cost tools out there that provide a more comprehensive picture of the conversation about your brand.
Here are just a few that seem to be sticking around and are getting some good buzz themselves:
- Addictomatic.com – monitors multiple platforms with an iGoogle kind of dashboard
- Socialmention.com – provides chronological results for the last month for 80+ online properties, with some basic metrics like sentiment, top sources, hashtags, users and keywords
- Kurrently.com – for Twitter and Facebook only, a chronological list of posts
- HootSuite.com – monitors multiple platforms in a user-friendly dashboard. Just last month, announced new reporting function and deeper analytics (for $5.99/month).
Bear in mind that you get what you don’t pay for – so there’s no fancy reporting, and results are point-in-time only. But it’s a great way to get started and to learn what’s possible before committing to something more robust.
– Ellen Repasky, SVP, Account Director
