Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a 'social rank' score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search - Technorati's new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced - Technorati's advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search - Google's index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket - Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse - Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Buzz Tracking

• Serph - Track buzz in real time
• Google Trends - shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia - Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
• BlogPulse Trends - Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
• Omgili Charts - Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
• eKstreme - blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Message Board Search Tools

• BoardTracker - tracks words in forums
• BoardReader - Search multiple message boards and forums.
• Omgili - Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
• Google Groups - Searches usenet groups.
• Yahoo! Groups - Searches all Yahoo! Groups.

Twitter Search Tools

• Twitter Search - Search keywords on Twitter which "self-refreshes". See what's happening -- 'right now'.
• Twitstat - Twitter Tweitgeist - Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
• TweetScan - search for words on Twitter
• Twit(url)y - see what people are talking about on Twitter
• Hashtags - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
• TweetBeep - Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
• Twitrratr - Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
• TweetMeme - View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.
• TwitScoop - Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.
• Twilert - Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.

Web Site Traffic

• Compete - Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
• Quantcast - Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
• Alexa - Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.
• BlogFlux Page Rank - Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites.

Search Data

• Google Trends - Search trends and see search volume by country and region.
• Google Insights - Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
• Wordtracker Keywords - Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase.
• Yahoo! Keyword Tool - Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month's search data.
• FACEBOOK LEXICON - Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms.
• Google Keyword Tool - Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes.

Multimedia Search

• YouTube - Search for videos and channels by keyword.
• MetaCafe - High-traffic video search engine.
• Google Advanced Video Search - Search for videos, what else?
• Flickr - Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users.
• Truveo - Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL.
• Viral Video Chart - Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.
• Guardian's Viral Video Chart - Weekly roundup of what's excellent on the web

Social Bookmarking

• Digg - Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos
• StumbleUpon - Social bookmarking - general cool stuff
• Delicious - Social bookmarking

Feed Aggregator

• Yahoo Pipes - Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome.

URL cruncher

• Bit.ly - URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc

Specific Social Network Tracking

• Adonomics - Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing.

Search Engine rankings

• PageRank Checker - Shows Google page ranking

Advertising and Event Tracking

• MediaHound - Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools