Social media monitoring tools are becoming more critical to companies who are interested in finding out whether they are making a mark online. These companies are also able to monitor whether the ‘word on the streets’ about their companies is positive or negative and can play a part in their online reputation management.

With the daily creation of new blogs, forums and social media sites, there are so many places for submission of feedbacks; it would be impossible to manually check for comments that aren’t keeping with your brand.

Online reputation management has now become an industry in itself with consultants and companies offering their services to clean up any mess.

There are various free social media monitoring tools available, in this post we’ll look at the most popular ones:

Addictomatic

This browser-based tool allows a search for a term, and will bring back results from blog searches and all the main search engines. It’s possible to customise what you see and don’t see and will highlight all returns for the site/tool in question.

Social Mention

This nifty free tool will come back with a rating on whether you are receiving positive or negative coverage by studying the words around your search term. It analysis the reach of a search term, associated keywords, the site where it is used the most etc. This social media alert tool is similar to Google alerts.

Facebook Search

This is one of my favourite tools at the moment. With Facebook Search you can easily unearth who on Facebook is talking about a particular term. It does give you an overhead bird’s eye view of what’s being said and by whom.

How Sociable?

This tool will give you a ranking of how well you are doing in terms of visibility. You can compare your brand against your competitors’ to see how well you are rating on all the top social media sites.

The correct use of these social media monitoring tools, would help you take proactive steps in influencing and directing the conversations about your company. They can also help you manage your online reputation.

If you know of more free online / social media reputation management tools, please share them with us below.