Social media &
54 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need social media monitoring tools. Before you reach for your wallet and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you will get an understanding of what is available and if you need any paid services.
I have collected 54 free social media monitoring tools. In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go:
Group A
HootSuite
Twitter account: HootSuite
Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics. Draft and schedule messages to send at a time your audience is most likely to be online. HootSuite has the dashboard for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.
SocialBro
Twitter account: SocialBro
Get accurate information about your community using different search criteria that will help you to make strategic and error-free decisions. Take advantage of knowing exactly who shapes your community: where your followers are from, which language they speak, their activity on Twitter, etc.
Social Mention
Twitter account: socialmention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. It allows you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites.
SocialPointer
Twitter account: socialpointer
SocialPointer is a real-time social media marketing platform for marketing agencies and individuals, It enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversation. SocialPointer lets you monitor, listen, respond and engage.
SocialSeek
Twitter account: socialseek
Get all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos, and more on any topic you want in one place. There’s a Socialseek site for everything and you can even make your own. I found some of the news sources other tools missed.
TwitterCounter
Twitter account: Twitter
Twitter Counter is the number one site to track your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.
Wildfire Social Media Monitor
Twitter account: wildfireapp
Measure your performance. Glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.
Klout
Twitter account: klout
Klout’s mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence. Klout measures influence in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers.
Group B
Addictomatic
Twitter account: addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and get info on what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. You can personalize your results dashboard and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search. News pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more.
Argyle Social
Twitter account: argylesocia
We provide software to help your organization participate in conversations with prospects and customers, drive brand awareness, and integrate social media deeply throughout your organization. And behind the scenes, we crunch your social activity through our big data engine to provide you with the most actionable social intelligence in the business.
Antavo Promotion builder
Twitter account: antavopromotion
Antavo is a web-based marketing software to build intelligent promotions. Supporting multiple platforms it helps to convert online traffic into paying customers without real IT knowledge. It improves add efficiency and increases lead generation.
Boardreader
Twitter account: boardreader
BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.
CoTweet
Twitter account: cotweet
Free version is for individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations. Free version includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications containing your latest mentions, team collaboration tools and access to Twitter follower profiles.
Cyfe
Twitter account: Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard software that helps you monitor and analyze data scattered across all your online services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Facebook, WordPress and more from one single location in real-time.
Edgerankchecker
Twitter account: edgerankchecker
EdgeRank is an algorithm that ranks objects in the Facebook News Feed. Pages with high EdgeRank Scores will be more likely to show up in the news feed, than Pages with low EdgeRank Scores.
Facebook Search
Twitter account: facebook
Facebook search is notoriously bad and will not find much, but if you have nothing else to do then give it a shot. It relies heavily on your social graph so the results you get may not be meaningful for your target audience.
Followerwonk
Twitter account: followerwonk
Followerwonk is a cool new social media analytics tool for Twitter. You can use this free social media tool to search for influential bloggers for a variety of activies including blogger outreach.
Google Alerts
Twitter account: Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.
Google Blog Search
Twitter account: Google
Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs. The blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results.
Google Trends
Twitter account: gtrendz
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.
HowSociable
Twitter account: howsociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
Icerocket
Twitter account: icerocket
Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.
Kred.ly
Twitter account: Kred
Kred is a social-media scoring system that seeks to measure a person’s online influence.Kred, which was created by the San Francisco-based social analytics firm PeopleBrowsr, attempts to also measure a person or company’s engagement, or as they call it, outreach. PeopleBrowsr hopes that that combination can offer a more informed metric for non-celebrities like entrepreneurs and those whom they follow and look to for advice.
Mentionmap
Twitter account: asterisqdataviz
Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.
Monitter
Twitter account: monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.
Nearbytweets
Twitter account: nearbytweets
Nearby Tweets is a geography-centric Twitter tool (localizing Twitter) for social networking, building customer relationships, and monitoring real-time buzz.
Netvibes
Monitor and analyze everything on a single platform with Netvibes. Now you can eliminate noise and get smarter, more relevant results by combining powerful adaptive analytics with expert human curation. And unlike “black box” analytics, our Open Corpus keeps you in complete control, while our award-winning SmartReader makes it easy to monitor hundreds of sources in real-time
NutShellMail
Twitter account: NutshellMail
NutshellMail lets you organize, monitor, and interact with all your social networks from a consolidated email digest delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. Nutshellmail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning.
Omgili
Twitter account: omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.
Pinerly
Twitter account: Pinerly
Pinerly.com is the easiest way to market your visual content onto social media sites, starting with Pinterest. Users can schedule pins, receive real time analytics on which pins are most effective, use multiple accounts, and bookmark. The company also churns out best practices data for content creators and brands on the platform.
Samepoint
Twitter account: samepoint
SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place across in blogs and social media sites. SamePoint converts discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. SamePoint can serve as the nexus where the conversations meet, providing a single place for all discussions on a specific topic.
Seesmic
Twitter account: seesmic
Seesmic is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build their brands online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins. Seesmic gives you social media monitoring, updating and engaging in real time.
SharedCount
Twitter account: yahelc
Track your shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a web address of a page and find out how much it has been shared in different social networking and bookmarking sites. Currently includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and StumbleUpon.
SocialOomph
Twitter account: socialoomph
Schedule tweets, track keywords, extended Twitter profiles, save and reuse drafts, view @mentions and retweets, purge your DM inbox, personal status feed — your own tweet engine, unlimited accounts.
Socialbuzz
Twitter account: socialbuzz
StepRep
Twitter account: steprep
StepRep provides an overview of the conversations people are having about your business online. Anytime your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you’ll hear about it. Sources are scanned continuously to bring you the most complete and up-to-date data on how your business is perceived. The data is broken down and analyzed in reports that can help you target your marketing and increase your online customer engagement.
Technorati Blogsearch
Twitter account: technorati
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site. It is not a very good tool for lesser known blogs as it misses a lot of great sites.
Tinker
Twitter account: tinker
Tinker helps you stay on top of your favorite events by showing you the latest buzz from Twitter and across the social web. Create or follow an event stream by choosing a keyword. An event could be anything: the Oscars, a new iPhone release, a movie premiere, a book launch, or a Superbowl party. Tinker also lets you search for the top news, topics and places people are talking about.
TipTop
Twitter account: twittiptop
TipTop Search is a Twitter-based search engine that helps you discover the best and most current advice, opinions, answers for any search, and also real people to directly engage and share experiences with. A search on any topic reveals people’s emotions and experiences about it, as well as other concepts that they are discussing in connection with the original search.
Topsy
Twitter account: topsy
Topsy is a real-time search engine. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain. Topsy’s algorithms identify influencers for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. It displays results for related terms and articles, trending topics, identifies experts (influencers) and shows you trackback pages for everything in its index.
Twazzup
Twitter account: twazzup
Twazzup is real-time news platform. It allows you to filter the news out of live Twitter content. It’s useful for understanding who are the influencers on a given topic and what are to trending sources.
TweetBeep
Twitter account: tweetbeep
Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions.
TweetPsych
Twitter account: TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform. Created by Dan Zarrella.
TweetReach
Twitter account: tweetreachapp
TweetReach measures the impact of social media conversations. Use it to understand how many people were reached by tweets about a topic on Twitter.
Twendz
Twitter account: waggeneredstrom
The twendz Twitter-mining Web application uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. Using the twendz application gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.
Twentyfeet
Twitter account: TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet is an “egotracking” service that will help you keep track of your own social media activities and monitor your results. We aggregate metrics from different services, thus giving you the full picture of what happens around you on the web – all in one place.
Twitalyzer
Twitter account: Twitalyzer
Analytics for social relationships. Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where they live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts. Twitalyzer provides Twitter’s most robust benchmark reporting, ranking Twitter users ten different ways. Authored by Eric T. Peterson author and blogger.
Twitrratr
Twitter account: twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.
Twitter Grader
Twitter account: grader
Twitter Grader lets you check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your Twitter username and you’ll get an instant grade and report. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.
Twitter Search
Twitter account: twitter
Use Twitter Search if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. Twitter Search lets you search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. Advanced Search allows you to create your queries using many advanced operators.
Twitter StreamGraphs
Twitter account: JeffClark
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the ‘@’ symbol to see the latest tweets from that user.
WhatHashtag
Twitter account: whathashtag
WhatHashtag is service that allows you to find the most used Twitter hashtags for the keywords you enter. Search for the keyword and you will automatically get the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss your topic. The result retrieves the last 1.000 tweets related to your keyword, and orders hashtags by frequency of use. Using WhatHashtag you will gain visibility when tweeting your opinions, being read beyond your followers in the most effective way.
WhoUnfollowedMe
Twitter account: whounfollowedme
Who.unfollowed.me is a service that helps you track your unfollowers, in real time, without waiting for a DM, or email. It allows you to check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes, without waiting for an email or a direct message.
That’s all folks. If you know of a great free tool then please let us know in the comments.
Posted on: July 16, 2012
What an excellent list of tools! While I know quite a a few of them, the rest looks really useful. Thank you!
Check out these free social media monitoring apps ranked by worldwide popularity http://www.appappeal.com/apps/social-media-monitoring/
Hi hi ! Great post !
We have just launched a new tool called “fourscan”. It is in beta testing, hence free !
It allows you to monitor and respond to foursquare tips !
Hi Priit !
Great post! You know smetrica.com? Is a free web application for facebook metrics. You can track the facebook pages of your competition, analyzing interaction with users, number of posts, comments, etc..
http://whoretweeted.com is a great tool to see who/where a specific URL (incl YouTube videos) has been shared. Results are updated in real-time.
oops, url is: http://whoretweetedme.com
Great stuff, and may I suggest that anyone looking to hone in on conversations, curate content and/or topic-tag for reach needs to use the brand new social media tool, for brand monitoring, listening, topic smart-tagging, and content curation (with proper referencing of original content creators): RiteTag is a tool for finding the “rite” tags for many social networks based on your query. We also provide stats and examples of recent updates with each tag suggested, so people can learn about the types of content that tends to go with a tag.
Some tools do tag illustration. Also, they do the job just with Twitter; http://www.RiteTag.com already has 10 social neworks (with topic-tagging) integrated, and will expand to more than 20 – which people can search on simultaneously. RiteTag – to find the rite tags, per network (they vary per network) and learn about tags as well. Its not about SEO, but SSO: social sharing optimization: optimizing social media updates to be seen by those not following you by name, but following and searching for your tagged topics. And absolutely nothing out there does what RiteTag.com does for this, not for one network, let alone the ten that we already have integrated.
woww..so usefull
Among the list, Seesmic is the one that I have used a lot of time for social media marketing. Thanks for sharing a list of Social Media tools it’s really recommendable.
Thanks – this is really valuable. Discovered a number of really valuable tools using this article
Awesome resource. We would like to be included in the list too. Hopefully next year. Thank for great post
Check out PinLeague too. http://pinleague.com The Clarity analytics suite is very powerful for social listening, tracking Pinterest presences and monitoring competitors on Pinterest
Sorry! This is not suitable for our list as it has no free option. 10 day free trial doesn’t count.
We actually launched a free option shortly after you left this reply. You can see it here: http://pinleague.com/pinterest-tools/free-pinterest-analytics/
The Forever Free account provides the ability to track 5,000 pins and a competitor, plus your own Pinterest profile and followers for free.
Thank you Danny!
Great tools! Monitoring social media is the need of the hour. With the onslaught of several social networking sites, consumers are armed with conversing about the brands, products and services with other people online. These interactions can be used to a maximum potential by businesses by simply monitoring and being involved in these discussions. This can provide a business with critical insights on strategic decision making, customer relations and feedback, marketing campaign tracking, public relations, market perception trends, conflict resolution and positioning of the brand. These in turn can go a long way in not only improving the customer perceptions but also build a stronger brand image.
Hi Priit, great list, I would definitely add http://www.oktopost.com to that list as an affordable tool for B2B social marketers.
An extensive range of tools however ours doesn’t feature. Next time you are producing a list such as this, we would love to be included. For more information, please see: http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/index.php. Demos/ trials available upon request.
Thanks,
Lucy
Sentimentmetrics.com
Hi Lucy,
Thank you for providing us with another tool.
We will take a look at it the next time we update the post.
Please also consider including SocialMotus. We’re a new, free social management tool platform for businesses and individuals. We’re building some innovative and powerful conversion tracking and social management features including priority messages inbox, targeted Twitter followers discovery, sales conversions by posts and much more.
You can review it by signing up for free here http://www.socialmotus.com or emailing me for more information.
I am looking for twitter schedulling. Now, I’m getting a lot of information. Amazing posting. Thank you so much for sharing.
What may the future of social media monitoring look like? I wonder what the scope and power of it could be? Could it be used to predict the stock market, to detect flu outbreaks? To replace political polls? As we continue to learn how to harness this massive amount of data I wonder what kind of wonders we can accomplish? Here’s an interesting infographic about the surprising scope of social media monitoring: http://www.postano.com/blog/social-media-monitoring-across-industries-infographic
This is a good list, but now most of them are not free anymore.
Most of these still have some kind of free option.
I’m a bit surprised you didn’t mention ThinkUp: http://thinkupapp.com/
Thansks for the tip!! I’ll have a test run with it.
Great article. I found it helpful to check out new apps for monitoring social media. I am looking for a tool that will tell you the best time to send out tweets or Facebook posts specifically based on your audience and followers. Can anyone recommend a great tool for this?
I have come across another website called Veooz – http://www.veooz.com. I really liked the Live Sentiment features. We can easily understand the tone of discussions happening on different social media on any topic
Hi,
Your content is really quite informative and resourceful in nature which gives necessary insights on the context of use of social media monitoring tools. Social media analysis tools scan through the vast online reserves of information and filter out that information which is valuable for the organization’s business benefits.
Please visit our blogs and share your views with us
http://goo.gl/Bry1Q
Thanks and Regards,
Pia Sen,
Marketing Manager @ Nuvento systems Pvt Ltd
Check out http://www.tweetmania.net ~~ Interactive word clouds of today’s trends on Twitter
Thanks for proving me this useful information. It will be very helpful for me in future. I have learn number of new things form this information.
Social Media Tools
Wow, nice list. There were quite a few of these such as social mention and twitratr that I am hearing for the first time.
U r spoiling my day now, rather than working, I will be researching these tools now
I was looking for some free social media tools and apps I could use and found this page and site. Thanks so much for the vast imformation. I’ve used probably about 10-15 of these tools already. Social media monitoring is so vast!
Hopefully some of these tools will integrate with the new Google+ Community Groups.
Awesome list, although some tools are missing, e.g. quintly.com, best tool for Facebook analytics.
Hi there,
Thanks for this excellent article.
I’d like to point out https://mention.net. It’s really a great tool to listen both to social and web.
All the best,
Antoine
Another great monitoring tool is CrisisVu which breaks away from the inflexibility of traditional monitoring dashboards to create a truly intuitive, instant ‘Vu’ of Twitter conversations about a brand or topic.
Thanks for mentioning http://www.antavo.com! (I have read it in the comments that most of the tools are not free any more. The good news is that we still have a free option. Thanks!)
Great list!
I’m glad you put this together, there are a few blogs here that I definitely need to
check out.
Thank you for the useful advice!
I think that people should be more educated in using social engines, both for their career endeavours and their own safety. Articles like this are making this happen
Tsvetomir
social-media-training-courses.co.uk
Personaly I use shoork since a few monthes and it’s really great for analytics and competitors monitoring http://shoork.com
As a social media manager I’ve seen that since Penguin our corporate blog http://cheapsocialmediaseo.com is getting *four times* the monthly Google traffic (we now rank at the top for incredibly competitive keywords) that we were getting pre-Penguin, with no focus on getting external links from websites at all.
Very cool list! I’d like to see you keep it updated. I’ve been using commun.it lately. So much of it is about what feels good, dontcha think?
Wow…cool post, Priit! I think the information in this list is really useful for choosing the RIGHT social media monitoring tool.
Even though the information you gave explains the essentials of each tool, it’s frustrating for me that the free-trials on many of these tools have a lot of strings attached. I like to be able to play around quite a bit with a tool before committing to paying for it, you know? I just tried out another free tool that I think is worth including called “Buzz Equity.” It’s a real-time social media search platform where you can search for mentions of a brand on an extensive list of frequented social media websites (including Asian platforms). The coolest part is that you can search as many times as you want for free! Anyway, the URL is: http://www.buzzequity.com