Neal's Notes

Whilst doing some research for a client re: various social media analytic tools/programs out there in the digital netherworld, I came across a number of them that may help your business or organization – and many of these are free.

Here’s my ‘Baker’s Dozen’:

Addictomatic presents all mentions of keywords or brand on one page. You’ll see images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts shared on Digg and much more.

Backtype – A comment aggregator, it searches through conversations across a variety of social media platforms including blogs, social networks, and other social media forums. It also offers email alerts.

Blogpulse Conversation Tracker – Creates a thread view of conversations that started on one blog and resulted in other bloggers responding with posts on theirs. Maps a blog’s permalinks to see where the conversations are heading.

BoardReader explores forums to figure out what users are saying about your organization.

Brandwatch — A social media monitoring system. Tracks brands, companies, campaigns, competitors.

coComment.com – A comment aggregator, coComment monitors online conversations through comments made on different social media sites. Follows news sources, blogs or forums. Also enables users who sign up for this free service to track all comments they take part in that mention their brand.

Google Trends – Enables you to see how popular the brand is across search engines, including what news articles have mentioned the term. This free tool also shows what regions have the highest search volume for the term, what cities it is most searched in, and in what languages the term has been searched for.

Ice rocket is a social media search engine covering video, blogs, Twitter, news, and images. Select to view results by day, week, or month, and narrow down the language field. Use their trend tool to see a visual representation of a brand, average numbers of mentions on a daily basis, and more.

Keotag – A search function that sifts through tags that user submitted content has been labeled with. The search process has two parts — first is to enter the keyword; second is to select one of the 17 social media platforms to search through.

Twazzup 2.0 beta is a dashboard that can gather all mentions of your organization on Twitter and present them in an organized manner.

Trendrr – The free account option allows users to track 10 terms from over 40 of the top social media and online services. Real-time social and digital media tracking allows users to monitor your organization and also key competitors.

TweetDeck — A Twitter and Facebook feed aggregator, tweet deck also has a keyword search option which updates in real time.

Yacktrack — Can search for comments on your organization’s content from various sources such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, WordPress blogs. Has a ‘Chatter’ tab allowing you to perform keyword searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand name. Search page results also provide an RSS feed for the search term.

Social media outreach can be a particularly challenging endeavor for a company’s services, especially if the products and services are highly focused for a niche technology market.

Hope you find these useful!