Pay Less, Get More: Social Media Monitoring Tools

By Hailey Keller

Social media is truly amazing, revolutionizing the way you communicate with your customers and connect to other business leaders in your community. With great power comes great responsibility; enter social media monitoring. Whether you're running a Fortune 500 company or a local pizzeria or famers market, creating a social media campaign should be one of your highest priorities. Positive or negative, you should know what your customers are Tweeting, Facebooking and blogging about your business and your brand. Social media outlets themselves may be free, but typically social media optimization is not. You do have quite a variety of social media monitoring tools to choose from, but if you have an optimization budget that is substantial and are ready to make the investment, we suggest you try Sysomos, Radian6 and Lithium to connect with and understand the needs and wants of your customers.

Here at TopTenREVIEWS, we understand small businesses and know that "large budget" may never be in your fiscal vocabulary. So we have gathered several low-cost and free social media monitoring tools that will be perfect for your small business or start up. When looking at low-cost and free monitoring tools, remember that in order to get the results that other social media experts are getting, it must provide you with:

Broad social media coverage (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news, etc.)
Real-time monitoring
Sentiment analysis
In-depth reporting and analytics
Demographic and niche capabilities

Each of these social media campaign options have pricing plans dependent upon several factors:

Number of mentions or posts you need analyzed per month
Number of user logins
Number of search terms
API Access
Analytics and reports

ReSearch.ly
If you are targeting a specific demographic or geological area, ReSearch.ly is the ideal low-cost alternative to create your social media campaign. Before you even create an account with this social media tool, you are able to have 10 preliminary searches. When you create an account, you also have a 30-day trial.

ReSearch.ly is easy to use, and it delivers powerful results in a four-step process:
Login with your Twitter account and begin a keyword search for your brand or business name.
Pick the location in which you would like to focus your keyword research.
Hone the search even more by filtering geographic location by demographics such as gender.
Use the Interest Graph to map connections to people discussing your brand.

With this social media tool, you have access up to 1,000 Twitter posts and other Twitter conversations, which will help you map an in-depth interest graph.

Social Mention
Social Mention is a free social media tool that is similar to Google News Alerts. You are able to perform keyword searches using over 100 different social media locations, if you choose. This is not a true social media monitoring tool, however, as it does not provide hard-core analysis of data that you collect. Nevertheless, you will still garner fantastic information.

CoTweet
This social media tool is actually free, if you opt for the standard edition, which may be perfect for you and your small business. CoTweet Standard does not include Facebook account access, but it does incorporate Twitter and engagement workflow tools to allow your small team to divide and conquer. Additional features include email notifications for your latest mentions, conversation history up to 30 days, message archive, multi-account publishing, bit.ly integration, scheduling and more.

If you are a startup company, or a small business, these social media monitoring tools may be the perfect option for you as they provide you the customer insight you need to develop a successful social media campaign free or at little cost. Social media monitoring is essential to success in this modern-day economy ruled by the world wide web.

At TopTenREVIEWS We Do the Research So You Don’t Have To.™