Jacob Morgan | Best-Selling Author, Speaker, & Futurist | Leadership | Future of Work | Employee Experience

Free Online Brand and Social Media Monitoring Tools

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I wanted to write about a few free simple to use but extremely valuable social media/online monitoring tools.  Now this is far from an extensive list but these are some of the tools that I really find valuable and wanted to share with you.  I’m sure many of you are going to have your own tools that you use or recommend and I’d love to hear about them so please share them in the comments below.   Let’s get into it.

Twitter Search

Many of you are familiar with twitter and I hope you are familiar with twitter search.  Twitter search is a search engine for twitter and it’s an extremely valuable twitter monitoring tool.  You can see what people are saying about you or a particular topic or you can type in something like “marketing help/marketing jobs” to look for possible jobs or prospective clients.  Twitter search is a great way to find out what people on twitter are talking about.

Google Alerts

I wrote about google alerts a little ago when I discussed how you can monitor your brand online for free.  Using Google Alerts you can receive notifications via email that let you know every time someone mentions a particular keyword(s) that you select.  You can create several alerts for things such as your company name, your product name, your name, etc.  Let’s say you work for Dell, you can create a Dell alert that will send you a list of every site that has mentioned the word “Dell” that day.  This is also great for competitive intelligence since you can use these alerts for any term (s).  You can also set up alerts for terms such as “Dell Sucks” to monitor negative comments about you or your brand.

Serph

Serph is a very valuable tool that tracks keywords or phrases in real time.  Serph doesn’t just look at search results it looks at all the available online information out there and it does so in real time.  If you want to get a good snapshot for a particular keyterm or phrase then Serph is the way to do it.

Google Queries

Google queries are an absolutely outstanding way to find out what the overall impression is about you or your company online.  You can start off simple by first making sure your site even appears in search results.  Then you can get a little sneaky and try queries such as “my brand sucks,” “I love my brand,” “my brand is horrible,” etc.  Of course you can also use Google Alerts to consistently monitor your terms or phrase.  Google queries also allow for an excellent way to do online competitive intelligence.

UPDATED: Google Analytics

I’m not quite sure how I forgot to mention this but thanks to KDPaine for reminding me.  Google Analytics is a very important and useful tool that everyone should have installed on their sites, and yes it’s free.  G.A. will tell you what your traffic is, where it’s coming from, who your visitors are, how your visitors found your site, who is referring them, how long people are staying on your site, etc.  Understanding your visitors is absolutely crucial and G.A. is probably the best tool out there to do so.

These are just a few of my favorite tools to use for online brand monitoring and of course they are all free.  There are other tools out there such as google blog search, icerocket, etc. that you can also use for online brand monitoring.

What are some of your favorite online brand monitoring tools and why?

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20 thoughts on “Free Online Brand and Social Media Monitoring Tools”

  2. jacobmorgan

    haha just updated that, dont know how i forgot that one! thanks for responding, i take it you received my email? 🙂

    thanks for reading and commenting!

  4. Cari

    You've mentioned some really great tools. We are a buzz marketing company that monitors online conversations and gets companies involved in the conversation. Sorry, we're not free. 🙂 But we are less expensive than many of our competitors because we focus on small and medium-sized businesses. Right now we are working as an agency but we will be releasing a consumer version of our software that will allow companies to self serve. If you have any questions about us, check us out.

    Cari
    Buzz.io

  5. jacobmorgan

    thanks allan glad you found the information useful. there are so many tools out there, these are some of the better ones though. there is a lot of information you can discover with free tools 🙂

    thanks for reading and commenting!

  6. jacobmorgan

    hi cari,

    thanks for the comments. hey, not everyone can be free right? 🙂 i will check out the site. im curious to see this new tools you guys are going to be releasing. im actually going to be announcing social media consulting services in a few weeks so if you need help with something let me know.

    thanks for reading and commenting.

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  10. ZealousMarketing

    To add to serph, an even better version is http://addictomatic.com

    We use that alot nowdays to track trends in reputation for bigger companies and also to monitor our smaller ones effectively.

    Hope this adds value to this growing list of Free Online Brand and Social Media Monitoring Tools!

    Best of success,

    Joe Perez
    CEO, Zealous Marketing – Strategic Web Estate Development

    Dont just THINK outside the box, RESEARCH outside the box!

  11. jacobmorgan

    hey Joe, thanks for sharing the link to addictomatic, looks like an interesting tool to use. i definitely see the value in tracking reputation trends for clients.

    thanks for reading and commenting Joe, glad we could connect online!

  12. BarbChamberlain

    What are you using for Twitter search, given that their own search button has been saying it's “temporarily” unavailable for two weeks or more now? I've tried various ones (which I find via a Google search) and haven't really been thrilled with anything yet.

    I'd like to search not just the current twitstream, but also people's profiles.

    @BarbChamberlain

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  14. jacobmorgan

    howdy,

    actually twitter search has been working for me for a while now. im not receiving any error messages and i see the real time updates. not sure why it's not working for you, but it's definitely up and running.

    thanks for the comment!

  16. jacobmorgan

    yep im familiar with that one 🙂 dont really use it though, just not something im too concerned with, i may glance at it occasionally but that's about it.

    thanks for reading and commenting

  19. anne jaa

    Well Social media allows us to discover, connect, and engage with new people of interest.These groups of networked individuals, often in similar demographic groups, have become a virtual gold mine for Internet marketers, who can place their message in front of members of their target market on social networking sites for little or no cost.The information you have given here is very important and helpful for all.Ne ways thanks for sharing.

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