TIP OF THE MONTH: Monitor your social media for FREE

June 22, 2009 | Posted by Carolyn Pikoulas
If you're using your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, and blog accounts on a regular basis, you've probably got your competition beat. But, how can you tell if you're doing a good job at keeping up with all of your accounts? Try some of these free monitoring tools to see how your brand stacks up, stay up-to-date with the latest search trends, and even find articles and ideas on what you should write about on your next blog post...

• HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics.
• Addict-o-matic - searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It's the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics.
• SocialMention - easily track 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 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc, together with a 'social rank' score.
• Google Trends - compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
• Trendpedia - Search blogs - discover who's discussing what, where, when and how. Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics.
• Twilert - lets you receive regular email alerts containing tweets that contain specific keywords or phrases. It's useful for those that want to track conversation and opinion on a brand, company or product on Twitter but don't have the time to sit in front of a Twitter Search page all day.
• Compete - Provides free information including site traffic history, competitive analytics, traffic referral and destination data. Learn where visitors go when they leave your site, and identify new competitive threats.
• Website Grader - measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.