What are the best online tools to monitor your brand

Dear Ileane,

You have a number of options when it comes to social media monitoring and it depends on your budget and what you're looking to monitor. For those who have up to $1,000 / month, you have many options available to you. But for paid tools to be truly effective you generally have to have about 150 on-topic conversations per day. Both price and volume of conversations are barriers for small businesses.

The ones you mention in your post are free tools. SocialMention is probably the most comprehensive free listening tool - also measuring sentiment, hashtags, users and tools. Also in this category is search.twitter.com, google blog search, linkedin search, and a plethora of others.
Free brand monitoring tools include: SocialMention, Google Alerts, How Sociable
Free influence monitoring tools include: Klout, Ice Rocket, Google Blog Search, SocialMention

The plethora of measurement tools available combined with a vast amount of analytics you can measure makes it very important to understand specifically what you'd like to measure before using the tools.

I hope this helps.

Lara McCulloch-Carter
President, READY2SPARK

To monitor activities in majority of the social platforms as well as your site and blog, I recommend and use Unilyzer.com.

Utilizing a dashboard approach with drill down details into multiple layers down. Also covers all the Google Analytics at the same time. Highly effective for the executive/business owner who wnts to know it all at a glance and drill Dow into anomalies as they appear in the dashboard.

There are many great sites everyone introduced and mentioned. I just want to include openbook.com which is great for checking who is talking about your company or brand through their statuses. It lists all the users statuses on one area and filters the words you input. It is easy and free. Try it out and let me know how you like it.

I'm using what you mentioned along with Twitter hashtags.

There are a lot of ways for no cost to monitor your brand, such as: 1) Google Alterts 2) Twitter Search 3) Twitter alarms (various). As far as paid monitoring services I have used MBuzz a Meltwater product, which is decent, but Radian6 is less expensive and they provide a real time dashboard similar to TweetDeck in design, but loaded with excellent features that puts the user in total control of mining information about their brand.

thanks

Mike Vallez

Hi Ileane,
Get Clicky is quite a good tool for monitoring http://getclicky.com/. It provides some good monitors such as who’s coming in to your website, how much time they are spending on the website and where they are coming from, also allows you to track more than one website. It has a little cost but the benefits certainly out weigh the costs. I have used it and found it quite useful. Hope that helps.

All the best with the search.

In addition to the list mentioned so far, Position2 Brand Monitor http://brandmonitor.position2.com/ is the platform you should take a look at. Brand Monitor has been designed for enterprises and agencies, enabling them to:
• Monitor social media conversations and Track all engagement in a single system.
• Filter actionable, high priority conversations from the noise
• Get detailed analytics and in-depth reports on the entire process and lot more.

You could try out the Brand Monitor Basic Edition (Free) with no time constraint and then opt for an edition that suits your needs best.

Disclaimer: I work with Position2.