FIVE THINGS

Great SocialListening Tools

You know what people say when they email, tag, or call your office, but what are they saying about you when you’re not the intended audience? Knowing that can be key to success, and that’s what social listening—tracking your mentions across social media even when you’re not tagged—does. But who has time to search every possible term every day? Nobody, and that’s why there are free tools to help you automate it. Here are five great social listening tools to keep you up on your online reputation.

1Social Mention. Search a term here and find out who’s saying what, what other terms they’re searching, the top keywords on the topic right now, and the top accounts talking about your topic. Set up alerts to get regular updates in your email and see how long people stay on that topic, when the last mention was, and what the strength and reach of those words are.

2Hootsuite. Link this online dashboard to your social media accounts (it’s easy, we promise) and monitor lists and set up searches that appear in real time right on the main page. Go beyond and schedule posts, monitor trends, and reply to the people talking about you. This is very similar to TweetDeck, another great tool, and choosing between them is a matter of personal preference.

3Buzzsumo. From tracking mentions to determining what news or articles or choose the whole internet to see what’s being said about your organization at any time.

keywords resonate to seeing who’s sharing what from your website and where they’re sharing it, this is an all-in-one tool that makes the most of almost all your social media and online activity. The free version does a lot—upgrade to the paid system for even more insight.

5Followerwonk. Listen to your mentions, search Twitter bios for potential new contacts, compare your Twitter account with your competition’s to find new influencers, and see how your reputation compares with anyone else’s. Twitter-specific,

4Google Alerts. The grandaddy of news and mentions searches, this is an easy to use, free tool that lets you do just what its name says: regularly search for a topic and get results emailed to you at regular intervals. Search just for this is a great free tool.