What are some of the best free tools to use to help manage and monitor social media?

My main tool is Hootsuite. I also like http://bufferapp.com for scheduling content.

For Twitter, Hootsuite is the best but for monitoring and report I use http://www.socialbro.com/

I use Tweetspinner (not free, but cheap) for Twitter, SocialOomph (not free, but cheap) for content scheduling on Twitter and Facebook, and Tweetdeck for realtime monitoring of Twitter. Have used SocialMention also for monitoring. I believe it's still free.

It all really depends on your objective, however here are a few I recommend checking out.

HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com/) is great for setting up accounts across essentially all networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) and then creating specialized tabs of relevant info you want to watch. For example you could have a tab that is called XYZ Watch and put in columns tracking certain keywords with brand name, or industry terms, whatever makes sense.

Dlvr.it (http://dlvr.it/) is a great tool for content promotion and distribution on social networks. Use it to help simply publish content from either your own blogs and feeds, or also you could add in your favorite blogs to promote that too! Bonus tip: Use the built in tracking function in dlvr.it to make sure that you connect your tweets, posts etc with your analytics! Know where your visitors are coming from.

HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com/)

So what is HootSuite exactly?
HootSuite is a dashboard that helps organize your social media accounts to increase the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns in a couple of ways. It helps you find targeted audiences and then provides a platform for you to send targeted messages across multiple social media platforms simultaneously.

Key Features:
The HootSuite dashboard allows you link multiple social media accounts to your one HootSuite account to keep track of multiple “streams” from all your accounts at one time. You can manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress and more, each with customizable streams to keep track of. Some examples of what you can manage include:

*Your Facebook news feed or wall
*Twitter mentions
*Sent tweets or retweets
*LinkedIn messages and status updates
*And much more…

Once you have linked your desired accounts with HootSuite, the dashboard allows you to send messages across any and all of the accounts that are linked, as well as giving the user the ability to schedule times for pre-recorded messages to be sent and to what accounts it should be sent to.
Perhaps the most beneficial feature of HootSuite is the ability to monitor conversations through key word streams. A key word stream gives you the capability to see all of the tweets people have made on Twitter about that specific keyword. These tweets will include people that you are not following which opens you up to a whole new audience to interact with. For example I created a stream with the key word “web design”, instantly I was able to see all the conversations pertaining to web design and all the questions people were asking, then I was able to respond to those questions and reach out to people I would never have found otherwise. This is an incredibly effective way of targeting an audience and growing it.

Here’s how to set up a Keyword Stream:

*Choose “Add Stream” at the top of the HootSuite dashboard
*Choose “Keyword” from the choices
*Type in a keyword or a few keywords into the box, ex: “Web Design”
*Hit create and boom, you now should have a stream with specific tweets relative to the keyword(s).

As well as monitoring conversations and managing social media accounts HootSuite offers a built-in URL shortener, which gives statistical breakdowns of link click-throughs for each twitter message. You can breakdown the data by region, popularity and date range. It also allows access to your Facebook insights and Google analytics account to track and record what your social networking is doing for your business.

the social media is facebook and link-din and focus.these are the places where we can share the valuable piece of information.

http://www.nichesuite.com/

There is a tool on Facebook called Insights that gives an instant statistics to your Facebook activities such as how many new fans you've got over given time, what actions were taken n response to your posting and so for. This might give you an idea on what type of content are the most appealing to your audience. I also use Google Analytics to evaluate traffic source and conversion for my custom segments. TweetDeck app is a really good tool for monitoring Twitter.

There are some outstanding ones that haven't been mentioned:

- google alerts (the original and still a key tool that serves many business purposes)
- socialmention.com
- addictomatic

And though I know the question is about free services, if you ever want to step into a higher level of analysis (but not free), alterian.com has fantastic products ("diclosure": their SM2 product was developed by a company a friend of mine started and later sold to Alteran. I have no financial or other interest in the business whatsoever, I just know it's good)

I also would like to share this article. I think it gives the best answer to the question: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/13-tools-to-simplify-your-social-media-mar...