Your brand, industry, and competitors are being discussed online whether you use social media or not. Actively monitoring what people are saying about you, your brand, your industry, and your competitors has many benefits, including protecting your brand reputation, discovering what customers want and need, learning of new opportunities, staying on top of competition, avoiding disasters, and measuring ROI.

Below are 25 monitoring tools that won’t cost you anything to use, and will help you gain a wealth of knowledge about your brand, influencers, prospects, customers, competitors, and much more.

1. Backtype – Get alerts of where your competitors are promoting their website and who they are interacting with.
2. Bit.ly – Shorten and track how many clicked on and retweeted your links.
3. BlogPulse – Get data from blogs, news posts and other online content that include you or your competitors in the conversation.
4. BoardTracker – Search forums and discussion boards or set up alerts that will tell you when and how often people mention a particular search term.
5. DomainTools – Get a report on a website’s domain information.
6. Google Alerts – Set up email alerts of target keywords or phrases that are important to you, your brand, and industry.
7. Google Analytics – See where your website traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited, what keywords are being used to find you, etc.
8. Google Video – Find videos on a specific topic, competitor videos, etc.
9. Jodange – Track consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
10. Klout – Measure who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.
11. Knowem – Check and reserve your brand, product, personal name or username on social media websites.
12. Monitter – Find out what people are saying in real-time on Twitter.
13. Oodle – Discover competitors’ plans for the future by monitoring the types of jobs they post online.
14. Quarkbase – See traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity about websites.
15. SEO for Firefox – Find out a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, if it’s listed in certain directories etc.
16. SEOPro Link Checker – Find out which sites link back to your website as well as your competitors’ sites.
17. SocialMention – Check and get alerts on what people are saying about a term across different blogs and social outlets.
18. Technorati – Find industry bloggers, influencers, and monitor who mentions you or your competitors in the blogosphere.
19. Trendrr – Find out how your brand or product is trending in real time compared to others.
20. Tweetburner – Shorten and track URLs on Twitter and Friendfeed.
21. Twendz – Track conversation and user sentiment on Twitter in real-time.
22. Twinfluence – Measure the combined influence of tweeps and their followers.
23. Twitter Search – Using keywords and phrases, search what people have discussed on Twitter.
24. Xinu – Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics
25. Yahoo Site Explorer – Discover who is linking to you and your competitors.

Of course, it does not stop with these. There are hundreds of tools out there! In another blog post, I will discuss the paid monitoring tools.

What tools do you use? Which free tools did I miss?