25 Monitoring Tools That Will Not Cost You a Penny
July 6, 2010 by Mirna Bard
Filed under Business, Internet Marketing, Social Media
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.
- Backtype – Get alerts of where your competitors are promoting their website and who they are interacting with.
- Bit.ly – Shorten and track how many clicked on and retweeted your links.
- BlogPulse – Get data from blogs, news posts and other online content that include you or your competitors in the conversation.
- BoardTracker – Search forums and discussion boards or set up alerts that will tell you when and how often people mention a particular search term.
- DomainTools – Get a report on a website’s domain information.
- Google Alerts – Set up email alerts of target keywords or phrases that are important to you, your brand, and industry.
- Google Analytics – See where your website traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited, what keywords are being used to find you, etc.
- Google Video – Find videos on a specific topic, competitor videos, etc.
- Jodange – Track consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
- Klout – Measure who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.
- Knowem – Check and reserve your brand, product, personal name or username on social media websites.
- Monitter – Find out what people are saying in real-time on Twitter.
- Oodle – Discover competitors’ plans for the future by monitoring the types of jobs they post online.
- Quarkbase – See traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity about websites.
- 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.
- SEOPro Link Checker – Find out which sites link back to your website as well as your competitors’ sites.
- SocialMention – Check and get alerts on what people are saying about a term across different blogs and social outlets.
- Technorati – Find industry bloggers, influencers, and monitor who mentions you or your competitors in the blogosphere.
- Trendrr – Find out how your brand or product is trending in real time compared to others.
- Tweetburner – Shorten and track URLs on Twitter and Friendfeed.
- Twendz – Track conversation and user sentiment on Twitter in real-time.
- Twinfluence – Measure the combined influence of tweeps and their followers.
- Twitter Search – Using keywords and phrases, search what people have discussed on Twitter.
- Xinu – Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics
- 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?
Mirna
You are right, there are hundreds of free tools out there (don’t get me started). I tried not list more here than you included in your post
competitious.com – Free service to track changes to competitors sites
alexa.com – traffic estimates top keywords for a website. Good to spy on competitors or find sites to advertise on
quantcast.com – provides demographic data for a website. Good to spy on competitors or find sites to advertise on
compete.com – traffic estimates top keywords for a website. Good to spy on competitors or find sites to advertise on
checkrankings.com – free version tracks your a site’s ranking for up to 10 keywords. Graphs the results
prettylinks – WordPress plugin that cloaks links and tracks the hits each link recieves
edopter.com – Trendcasting. tracks the spread of new trends around the world in real time
twittercounter.com – tracks your twitter followers in a graph
tweetstats.com – tracks your twitter stats
feedburner.com – tracks your RSS feed stats (owned by Google)
pogee-web-consulting.com/tools – tools to track where your Google AdSense ads, Google Adwords and Yahoo ads are being displayed
spyfu.com – competitive analysis info
tynt.com – tracks what is copied from your site and adds a link back if it is posted on another site
sitemeter.com – real time site traffic
getclicky.com – website analytics
aremysitesup.com – website uptime monitoring
247webmonitoring.com – website uptime monitoring
uptimerobot.com – website uptime monitoring
clockingit.com – time clock for time mgt or tracking how long you work on a project
Ego Searches – monitor blogs and news portals for keywords (your company or product or a competitor or their product). Create dynamic RSS feeds that update when the keyword is mentioned
news.google.com/news – do akeyword search in Google News, click on the RSS link and add the RSS URL in your RSS reader
blogpulse.com – Find what is being said about your products, company or industry on blogs. Same procedure as Google News. Provides graph of keyword occurences
pubsub.com – Can direct your search to include only specific areas such as press releases, SEC filings, Newsgroup posts, etc. Same procedure as Google News
technorati.com – Real-time blog search engine. Add keywords to a watch list and use blue RSS icon at the bottom
icerocket.com - Same procedure as Google News
findarticles.com – Searches traditional media channels (magazines and publications) for keyword mentions. Same procedure as Google News (use “RSS Alert” link)
newstrove.com – Searches news articles. Same procedure as Google News (use the “XML” icon on the right)
blogdigger.com – Seearches blogs. Same procedure as Google News (use XML icon)
daypop.com – Same procedure as Google News
news.yahoo.com – Same procedure as Google News. Click “view as RSS”
Thanks for sharing more with my readers, David…I am sure that will give them a lot more work to do!
Hi Mirna, surprised the tool names don’t link to their respective sites.