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Social Media Monitoring: 100+ tools and counting

  

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In researching social media tools, I have discovered, like many others, that there are literally hundreds of tools to pick from. To help you manage your way through all the tools, I have grouped them into 3 categories to help sort through the mess. These categories are :

1. Tools to help manage my accounts,
2. Tools to help track my tactics and
3. Tools to monitor all the social media channels (blogs, twitter, forums etc).

Tools to help manage your accounts
The tools listed below are designed to consolidate your social media accounts and allow you to post from a central spot. They monitor keywords for a few channels (ie Twitter)  and most of these tools also offer a mobile version.

Checkout the following Social Media Publishing Tools

1. Hootsuite: This tool provides a great interface for pulling all your twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Linkedin accounts into a central spot. You can quickly scan your accounts for items to respond to, or publish a new post. 
2. BuddyMedia: focuses solely on managing your Facebook fan pages and a result provides more in-depth tools.
3. Seesmic:  Manage your twitter community from anywhere. 
4. TweetDeck: More than just twitter, it watches Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and more. 
5. Brizzly: Manage your social media accounts from a single tool.
6. Sprout Social:  Similar to Tweetdeck, and Hootsuite these tools help manage your social media voice.

Tools to measure success

Use these tools to help track the success of your social media campaign. Find out who's clicking your links or reading your blog etc. 

1. Google Analytics (free)  - Simply add a snippet of code and start collecting visitor data on your blog. You can also use some very nice 3rd party iPhone apps to view results.
2. Bit.ly - URL Shortener with some impressive tracking metrics. Make sure all your tweets with URL's use a tool like this. 
3. Add This - Add this piece of code on our site to help people share your links with a simple click. Works with numerous sites (FB, Twitter, Digg)

Monitoring Tools
These tools are designed to help monitor keywords and find articles/posts of interest. People use these to track brand names, CEO's, product lines, competition or industry news.  Tip: use "Iphone 4" as a search term  if testing a tool to see how it handles large volume of data and how well it organizes it).

In this category, there are many free tools but they generally prevent you from logging your findings, adding notes, assigning them or storing them for future reference. Note: Google Alerts is not listed as it provides a tiny fraction of the results/functionality the below services will return.

1. Samepoint (free) - With over 15 media types being searches (video, microblogs, forums) , this is a great tool to do a quick check on a keyword and see what comes back. However you can't save searches, or make comment. Does limited sentiment analysis
2. Social Mention (free)  - has a cleaner interface that Samepoint yet slower and less categories
3. Internet911  (Paid as part of a bigger offering) – pulls from numerous sources (video, blogs, twitter, forums web), stores the findings and allows you to manage issues via a workflow tool. The overall program provides several other benefits including the tracking  of domain name registrations.  
4. Trackur (1 keyword - free, Paid) - has less category filtering and results then the above two, yet allows you to do some limited workflow.
5. Spiral16 (Paid) - pulls form various source and offers sentiment analysis.  
6. Hubspot -  offers as part of a bigger offering social media monitoring with no workflow component. 
7. ViralHeat (Paid) - focuses on analytics
8. ScoutLabs (Paid) - clean interface for managing large volumes of data, though it offers limited workflow tool
9. Radian6 (Paid):  Enterprise level solution that offers flexible reporting and widgets.
10. Brandprotect SMART (PAID) – Primarily focused on the Financial Services and Pharmaceutical industry, this tool offers in-depth sentiment and relevancy scoring on all social media findings using an industry taxonomy.