With social media continuing to increase in importance for online marketers it's important to measure the results.

While the volume of engagement is fairly important, it comes second to understanding what users are saying about your brand or products.

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Allocating a chunk of budget for professional monitoring companies and technology has enormous benefits, but it can be costly, especially for smaller businesses. Thankfully there are some great free tools out there to help you make sense of things:

1. Netvibes- A web-based personal news aggregator.

2.  Google Alerts – Real-time alerts, emailed to you, whenever your chosen keywords are mentioned.

3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere. 

4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.

5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.

6. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

7. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.

8. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.

9. Technorati - Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs

10. Tinker - Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.

11. TweetDeck - Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.

12. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS feed. 

13. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed. 

14. Social Mention - Think Google Alerts but for social media. Receive free daily email alerts on mentions of your brand, your company, your CEO, your marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor

15. Omgili - A specialised search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, answer boards and others.

For more information on social media, call or email us: 09 889 8020 or results@steer.co.nz

Social Media Resources

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