Ever wonder what your social media presence looks like? Are you trying to
- Listen / Monitor Activity
- Find and Identify Influencer’s
- Competitive analysis
- Market Research
- Customer support
- Engage with customers online
- SEO and link building
- Reputation Management
these 6 free services check and collect content from:
- Blogs
- Wikis (Such as Wikipedia)
- Message boards/Forums
- Video/photo sharing website (like Flickr and YouTube)
- Mainstream media blogs (Wall Street Journal blogs)
- Microblogs (like Twitter, Friendfeed and Plurk)
- Social networks (like Facebook and MySpace)
To get data you can manually configure a Data Set or track sites like Google, Technorati, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.. The results begin to appear within 24 hours.
Many graphics are for trends so it is also a resource you can use on your blog by embedding graphs into your posts.
Out of all the services reviewed here, Trendrr is the least favorite of mine for several reasons. Primarily focused on visualizing trends and not providing a snapshot of the overall social media landscape, there are too many pages of information to dig into and walk away with any solid learning’s as a snapshot.
That said, Trendrr does have a really cool functionality where you can “drop” any set or combination of graphs and research data points on top of each other for a cumulative view and comparative analysis.
Samepoint, is an interesting Web 2.0 service that allows you to search chats from multiple sources and the comments of blogs and social media sites. Samepoint takes all these messages and organizes them in a layout similar to Google search [both paid and organic]. On the right in a 120x skyscraper are recent conversations, the main results feature a “social tone” bar , time posted, a text snippet and the originating social site source.
Very simple to use, comes with an intuitive interface and you can find any topic among millions of conversations by typing any word or site URL.
The clearest objective of having a social web presence is to have influence in a subject area under a group of followers to spread your message wherever they go. Social Mention provides some significant feedback on top keywords, sentiment, top users and sources. For a free too the insight is amazing and the speed with which the tool aggregates the data is speedy by other tool comparisons.
All I can say about this service is way cool! Tracking TV is something new and unique to the social sphere, that this is all bundled together is really quite amazing, that is if you are on TV or have a presence on TV. How they incorporate TV is via closed caption, they scrape the text and add it to their mix. Great idea and starts to close the gap and wrap the communications platforms together. Stay tuned for Google’s new service called Listen. Under Labs right now, the service is able to search audio. Be prepared to have more media platforms and outlets converging.
Clean, simple and easy to understand, there are a lot of sites the service checks and allows you to reduce or add social sites. The scoring attributed to any sites in regards to scoring is a little lose for me as is the overall “score” you receive. If there was a benchmark to compare yourself either by industry or other sites I would like the service more.
Very similar to HowSociable but with a black background Addict-o-matic actually gives you details on what was found on any given social outlet. Again, as with HowSociable you have the option of adding or deleting services you want to ping. There is also a hot and trending section that lets you see what everyone is talking about o
n a given subject broken down by popular topics or news sectors.
n a given subject broken down by popular topics or news sectors.
Social Media and ROI
All these sites are great for getting a sense of your Social Presence but they all lack one thing in common. None of these social tools shown have the ability to show you the ROI, relative to your social efforts and definitively guide you towards a better strategy and tactics. Overdrive Interactive is one of the only companies I know of that has closed the loop on Social Media and ROI.
The Overdrive Social Media Dashboard is not a free product for public use. As an Enterprise level listening platform ,no less than 40 individual elements are examined and combined in such a way as to immediately give any C level executive, insight into their marketing efforts. Trending events, tabular control of channels and point to point insight of your PR efforts, seamlessly weaves the whole social strategy into a digestible story.