9 Free Social Media Monitoring And Analysis Tools

There are many tools free and otherwise currently competing for your attention when it comes to monitoring, measuring and analyzing your social media data. I have compiled a list of 9 free tools that I currently use on a near daily basis to monitor my social media activities and for each have given a quick rundown on what to expect when using them.

1. Google Alerts is a free service provided by Google that allows you to enter a keyword or set of keywords for tracking purposes. After deciding on which keywords you want to monitor you then decide the frequency at which you want to be alerted to a match on the keywords. At minimum you should be using Google Alerts to be tracking your brand name.
2. Postrank is the service you want to use if you are looking to monitor and track how your content is performing in the social web. Using their Topics tool you can measure the impact your content has had based on a variety of metrics that they track, including: site comments, tweets, Facebook posts, shares on Google Reader and other real-time web metrics. You can use their Topics tool for free but the Analytics tool is limited in its free state but they have plans starting from $9 per month that allow you access to even more of the data.
3. Klout.com is primarily a Twitter tracking service but they have recently launched a Facebok monitoring tool. They break your data down into a Klout score which is a measure of your influence, your ability to generate retweets, and you and your audiences engagement levels. Using their Content Analysis tools you can determine your most retweeted content as well the most popular links you have shared.
4. Twitalyzer is another Twitter influence tracking service that offers data related to where you rank within Twitter. They measure data points such as how many times you have been retweeted, your follower count, your impact and your engagement level. You can break this data down into days of the week and even hours of the day to help you determine when your tweeted content is best received.
5. Socialmention works a lot like Google Alerts but geared more towards social media. After performing your search the data returned includes measurements related to the sentiment surrounding your search, the top keywords, the passion at which others are talking about your search, the strength or likelihood that someone is talking about your brand as well as your reach.
6. Twitter Search is another free tool your brand should be using to monitor what is being said about you on Twitter. You can also use the advanced search features to monitor for any negative or positive sentiment being associated with your brand so you can deal with the negative appropriately and fix the issues or just say thanks to someone for mentioning your brand positively. After performing a search and to continue monitoring you can subscribe to the RSS Feed for that query to continually monitor your search.
7. Trackur is a simple to use monitoring tool that works by gathering together all mentions of your keyword search from around the social web. You can then save your searches and subscribe to the feed or have the results emailed to you. With the free version you are limited to a single saved search.
8. Google Analytics is a free analytics service that most brands use to track traffic to the site, referrals and bounce rates and other metrics used to determine the popularity of your site. Take advantage of the custom reports features to monitor which social networks and bookmarking sites are sending the most amount of traffic to your site so you can craft content appropriate for each of those networks.
9. A URL Shortening Service is a must when posting to Twitter to ensure that your message and link fit within the 140 character limit. Make sure you select a service such as bit.ly or ow.ly that allows for analytics and then stick to the service so you can track and monitor your contents performance.

What tools are you currently using to monitor and measure your brands social media impact?
Are there any free tools missing from this list that you swear by? What has your experience been using paid tools such as Radian6? Let me know in the comments below.

Flickr photo “The Detective” by paurian