Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. It’s clear that social media is valuable, but measuring social media ROI proves to be a challenge.
Luckily, there are numerous free and low cost tools you can use to measure your social media activity. Do you want to know the increase in brand mentions? The number of conversions directly related to social media efforts? The growth rate of your online community? Know what you are measuring and why when choosing your social media monitoring tools.
Here’s a list of 20 free social media monitoring tools worth checking out:
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a web-based dashboard that allows you to monitor multiple social networks in one place. You can collaborate with fellow employees, schedule messages, and assign tasks to your team. It’s particularly great for managing multiple accounts on the same platform. This is one of my personal favorites.
2. Klout
Klout provides an influencer score based on your social media activity. Your Klout score is determined using over 400 variables. In addition to working on your own Klout score, you can look at your influences and who you influence to regularly share content that is of the highest quality from trusted sources.
3. TweetReach
Who is reading your tweets? How is it being shared? What is the measured impact of what you’re putting out there? TweetReach is a social analytics tool that helps you capture this valuable information.
4. TwentyFeet
TwentyFeet aggregates your activity from various social media platforms so you can get the full picture of your online presence. Then, you can determine which of your activities are most valuable.
5. Twitalyzer
Measure your impact, engagement, and influence on Twitter with this tool. They offer three plans, depending on your needs, Individual, Business and Agency, all at a very reasonable price. They do offer their three most popular reports for free, so just connect your Twitter account and start Twitalyzing.
6. PeerIndex
Use this tool to determine your online authority and who your online brand advocates are. Learn which topics are best for you to focus on and who to connect with to spread the word.
This dashboard gives you all of the analytics data related to your Facebook page so that you can track growth and impact. Use the Insights to better understand your followers and reach the right audience.
Track and measure who is talking about you, your company, your product, or any topic related to your industry. SocialMention pulls data from hundreds of social media services to give you the most accurate, real-time information.
This tool allows you to track and monitor social mentions and respond in real-time. Find potential customers, listen to what your competitors are saying, and get immediate feedback about your business.
10. SocialBro
Manage and analyze your Twitter account with SocialBro. This tool gives you detailed information about your Twitter community so that you can interact with followers more efficiently and garner the best results.
11. FollowerWonk
This Twitter analytics service, now owned by SEOMoz, allows you to understand and sort your followers. Learn when your influential followers are most active so that you can select the best times to engage your community and to ensure you’re reaching the right people at the right time.
12. HowSociable
Measure your brand’s impact online with this tool that provides you with a magnitude score. The score analyzes your level of activity online so that you can determine whether you have enough of a presence.
13. Seesmic
Manage all of your business’ social media accounts in one place with Seesmic. Quickly view and respond to social activity in real-time even from your mobile devices.
14. Engag.io
This is a great tool for managing your conversations on social networks. Engag.io provides you with valuable insights into the people you are talking to via social media and also gives you a place to track whether or not you’ve responded.
15. TweetDeck
Arrange feeds from all of your social networks in one place using the TweetDeck dashboard. You can also schedule tweets and set-up customizable feeds for your social search needs.
16. Brand Monitor
Track your brand across numerous social media sites. Find where conversations relevant to your business are taking place so that you can start becoming an active social media participant. Learn trending keywords and measure conversation engagement to help bring more valuable brand content to social media platforms.
17. Kred
Similar to Klout, Kred mines social data to give you a Kred score. The score is a combination of your influence and your outreach activity. Kred measures how often you tweet or post, how people interact with you, and the growth of your audience. Kred gives you a detailed breakdown of your score so that you know exactly where you should improve and the areas in social that are working well for your company.
18. Google Analytics Social Reports
Nicely integrated into your Google Analytics platform, Social Reports helps measure how social traffic is directly impacting your conversions. Using an overview of your social networks, this tool allows you to visualize your social traffic so that you know where your time is best spent in the social world.
19. TwitterCounter
TwitterCounter tracks Twitter users to give you statistics and usage information for your account. This service offers a very basic free package with graphical data, but you can pay a bit more for access to an account comparison feature, more updates, report exports, and more.
20. Topsy
This is a real-time social search engine. Sort through the latest social activity related to your industry, brand, or community and apply that knowledge to future business decisions.
There’s a lot of overlap in the services these social media monitoring tools provide. It’s most important that you find the tool that aligns with your business needs and personal preferences.
Social Media Photo via Shutterstock
About Ilana Bercovitz
Ilana Bercovitz is a social media and marketing professional at ReTargeter, a full-service display advertising solution specializing in retargeting. Ilana has served as a featured contributor and online content editor for CloudShare, Dream of a Nation and many others. 
[...] 20 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools You Should be Using, Small Business Trends [...]
Great list! I stopped using Klout when it lost it’s usefulness a while ago
Thanks! Completely understandable about Klout. Oddly enough, I’ve seen some companies require a minimum Klout score for job applicants…in social media positions of course.
That’s sort of silly, considering Klout can be so easily manipulated. But maybe that’s why they want you to have a high Klout score… to show that you know your stuff enough to manipulate it.
Hi Ilana,
That’s a very comprehensive list. I didn’t even know about a couple of them.
And thanks for including Engagio!
William / CEO, Engagio
You are very welcome! Glad my list was helpful and hope it brings some attention to your company.
And the referrals from this post to us were pretty good too
Very nice comprehensive list, thank you for the efforts.
Thanks for reading! Hope it is helpful.
Hi, Ilana! Thanks so much for this post…it’s great!
Thanks for reading! So glad you enjoyed!
Definitely! I signed up for accounts on most of them today and really enjoyed some of the monitoring features. Thanks again!
[...] Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. [...]
Just starting to learn about social media!
[...] Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. [...]
[...] Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. [...]
Where are Buffer and Tweriod? They rock my world!
I am not familiar with those, I’ll have to look into them!
Glad to see Engag.io on this list. That one, in particular, is a life saver for me!
Another, newer player is SocialPing. I suggest people try this one out. It provides monitoring, tracking, reporting and *recommendations* for your Twitter life. It is strictly for Twitter right now, but once you dig into it the intelligence it returns is killer.
Thanks Kirsten!
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll look into SocialPing. Sometimes it’s nice to have different monitoring tools for each network.
Thanks for the shoutout, Kirsten!
One thing that really sets us apart is instant notifications on anything you want to track. They can be sent to absolutely any device, via SMS, push-notification, RSS, email, etc.
P.S. Excellent choices for this article. We also integrate Klout and PeerIndex within Socialping
Excellent article, as full as to distribute and parameterize our information, I will try some that I need, I’m a fan of TweetDeck but lately the platform started with some drawbacks!
A hug and success!
Thanks for reading and for your support! Have you tried HootSuite? It’s one of my favorites.
[...] Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. Las redes sociales se está convirtiendo en un foco principal de marketing para pequeñas empresas. Los medios sociales son una excelente herramienta para construir una comunidad alrededor de su producto o servicio, ampliar su mercado objetivo, y para escuchar lo que sus clientes quieren. [...]
Ilana Bercovitz: Great list of social media monitoring tools. I will bookmark it on my Google+ page. Did you hear that Seesmic is now acquired by HootSuite?
Thank you for reading, Martin. I’m so glad this list is helpful. I did see that! I wrote the article before it happened. Have to admit that I’m not surprised. Oddly enough, I found Seesmic more useful when I had a Droid, but now that I’m on the iPhone, I am a huge fan of HootSuite. Maybe this acquisition will improve Seesmic.
One more thing Ilana. I’m not sure what commenting system is being used on this blog, but I recommend they look at Disqus. Multiple advantages: a) the user sees a familiar signon, b) Disqus has a referral mechanism now where the site can earn revenue, c) it places related articles below the comments so it increases your traffic, d) and since Engagio integrates deeply with Disqus, you will see more users coming back from Engagio because we share where your friends are discussing and you’ll get visibility on the Engagio network too.
I will definitely pass your Disqus recommendation along. I used the service at the last company I worked for and enjoyed its many features.
Nice article. It’s hard to believe that Klout is such a controversial topic. Whenever that service is mentioned, somebody always has to make a negative comment.
They say all press is good press! Regardless of how Klout stirs strong opinions, people use it so I felt it should be included. Thank you for reading.
Great list. We’ve explored many of these…including Klout…but there’s some new discoveries there well worth delving into.
Thank you, Steve. I hope you find something worth using!
All seem to be a great source of contacts. I’m still partial to LinkedIn. It has served me well.
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Excellent compilation. I was only aware of couple of them. Every small business owner should mark this article under ‘no-excuse’. We are going to forward this to our clients too.
Thanks so much! I am so happy you find the article helpful.
Very useful article thanks. We are launching a new service and this information is invaluable to social media novices like us!
Thanks, Martin! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.
HI Ilana,
Great article, really good collection of Social Media tools. I would love to discuss Social Media Analytic tools with you further via email, could you drop me a line?
Many thanks,
Rhian
Hi Rhian,
Glad you found it useful! I’d be happy to discuss further. Feel free to send me an email at ilana.bercovitz@gmail.com.
Please also consider including SocialMotus.com. We’re a new, free social management tool platform for businesses and individuals. We’re building some innovative and powerful conversion tracking and social management features including priority messages inbox, targeted Twitter followers discovery, sales conversions by posts and much more.
[...] social-media activity, and the number of brand name drops can all be gleaned from monitoring tools. Smallbiztrends.com recommends several social-media-monitoring tools, such as Hootsuite, which is a useful web-based [...]
Nice list of tools for all of us Internet Marketers Ilana! Another tool worth mentioning is SocialSeek, but I can tell you there are so many related sites popping up that it can be a daunting task to maintain. What method do you prefer when prioritizing a top 20 list?
Thanks so much for reading, Dwight. That’s a great question. I tend to do a lot of research on tools like these when there’s a particular feature I’m needing for work. As I try various tools, I maintain a list of each and what I liked and didn’t like. I also have numerous Google Alerts on social media related news, which often give me new tools to try. I know I left many great ones off of this list. These just happen to be the ones I have had the opportunity to really explore. I’ll check SocialSeek out.
Please also consider including SocialMotus. We’re a new, free social management tool platform for businesses and individuals. We’re building some innovative and powerful conversion tracking and social management features including priority messages inbox, targeted Twitter followers discovery, sales conversions by posts and much more
[...] – Google Analytics – Google Webmaster Tools – Social Media Monitoring Tools [...]
Another free tool is:
http://www.coolsocial.net
Take a look.
[...] about the tools you can use to measure the impact of your social media (for example, check out this list of 20 tools from Smallbiztrends or follow the monitoring category on this blog) but what I mean here is just to make sure you are [...]
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This is a great list post Ilana. I’m personally fond of Tweet Deck. I find it incredibly easy to use and I’m able to organize the people I follow in to easy to monitor lists. Thanks for sharing this awesome post with the community. I appreciate it!
Ti
Ti,
Thank you for your support. I’m just glad I could help out! I also like TweetDeck, but lately I’ve been using Hootsuite more. Maybe I’ll get back into TweetDeck now that you mention it.
Hi Ilana! Awesome article – I learned about a few new tools I never heard of. I am new to social media marketing for my business and I just started using Blurtster. I checked out many of the ones listed here and I liked Blurtster the best. It is easy to use, gives me the info I need (and more) and it is by far the cheapest of the ones I looked at. Thought I would give my new favorite tool a shout out!
Thanks for reading, Jessica! There are so many tools out there, that often it comes down to personal preference. Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll take a look at Blurtster.
[...] capability to ask questions – and get answers from – other like-minded users. Easily accessible social media tools enhance consumer-to-consumer communication, making it even more critical for business owners to [...]
I like this list and must say this article is very informative.
Thank you for reading, Mo.
Some of them are really great tools.
I always use many tools for the monitoring of social media.
It’s good to know that there are some tools like these that can be added to my tool list.
Yes, there is a plethora of tools out there. Always happy to hear new suggestions.
[...] Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or …smallbiztrends.com/…/20-free-social-media-monitoring-tools.h… [...]
Hi,
Your content is really quite informative and resourceful in nature which gives necessary insights on the context of use of social media monitoring tools. Social media analysis tools scan through the vast online reserves of information and filter out that information which is valuable for the organization’s business benefits.
[edited by Editor]
Thanks and Regards,
Pia Sen,
Marketing Manager @ Nuvento systems Pvt Ltd
Thanks for reading!
Great information here, I was unaware of all these fabulous social media marketing tools at hand! Thanks!
Excellent list! I found Klout to be a very interesting insight as to how influential others are on Twitter. Cheers!
Thanks for reading! Klout definitely has its use.
[...] free social media monitoring tools: http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/09/20-free-social-media-monitoring-tools.html « The Dark Side of Monitoring and [...]
Nice list but Quintly, in my opinion the best tool for Facebook analytics and benchmarking, is totally missing.
I don’t know Quintly. I’ll look into it. Thanks for the tip.
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Can you please provide a contact email for you. Working on a social media presentation for my company. Interested in chit-chat.
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What do you think about this platform? http://www.sozializeme.com I’d like to know if you find it as useful as I do. Best, Antonio
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Setting up a new team for social media is very hard however with tools like these, it does make things a lot easier.
Thank you for making things easier for us.
[...] Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for small businesses. Social media is an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. It’s clear that social media is valuable, but measuring social media ROI proves to be a challenge. [...]
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Great post, Ilana! I think your input on the various social media monitoring tools is really helpful.
Although your list of social media monitoring tools was extensive, I wanted to highlight a free tool called, “Buzz Equity.” It’s a real-time social media search platform where you can search for mentions of a brand on an extensive list of frequented social media websites. A key feature of this tool is that it incorporates Chinese and Asian social platforms, so if you are interested in those markets you really must try it out.
[Edited by Editor]
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Hi Ilana, thanks for posting this list. I have shared it on our team call and it has started a great discussion around these and others as well.