Brands often ask us how to measure ROI for social media and how to segment, target and build specific target market followers rather than just mass collecting followers. Here are some of the free tools that brands can use to monitor and measure their social media impact and visibility:
Addict-o-matic – produces a consolidated page with search matches across blogs, Twitter, Digg, Flickr and more.
Alltop – the online magazine rack – search for influential bloggers listed by specific subject and topics.
Blogpulse – an automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.
Boardreader – search engine for forums. Get fast and quality search for your own forum.
Boardtracker.com - sometimes slow. Many results that are found only here.
Buzzstream – helps you build a dossier about your influencers.
Dailylife - search news and editorial commentary for influencers in traditional media.
delicious.com - check for links to your keyword(s)
Facebook – use the “search” function to identify topics and people who are talking about them.
flickr.com - after all this stuff you will enjoy some images for your keyword(s)
Google – possibly still the ultimate free tool for finding influencers, especially since the launch of Google Blog search, Google Realtime search and their “Discussion” search option.
HubSpot Twitter grader – check the power of a twitter profile compared to millions of others that have been graded.
IceRocket – search social networking sites and blogs to find influencers and online creators (people who upload images or talk passionately on a social network about a brand).
Klout – currently the most respected measure of Twitter influence, Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations.
Lijit – build relationships with the online influencers and connect directly to their audiences.
MentionMap – visualiser tool that allows you to quickly assess the most influential people on Twitter.
Monitter – monitor Twitter for key words, phrases and topics that are being discussed online.
ObjectiveMarketer – find your influencers and amplifiers across various social media platforms.
PeerIndex – helps you discover the authorities and opinion formers on a given topic.
PostRank analytics – discover your influencers, identify which social networks give you most traction and benchmark yourself against the competition.
Pulse of the Tweeters – uses data mining and sentiment analysis to mine millions of tweets and find the most influential people on Twitter.
Socialmention – features an interesting combination of metrics including reach, sentiment, passion, and strength for blogs, Twitter, news, images, video, and audio.
Social Profile – keeps you informed of other peoples’ activity in the social web.
Social Seek – helps you find out who is making the most noise about your brand.
Technorati – considered to be the leading blog search engine – useful for finding influential blogs.
TipTop – Search for current trends and topics of interest.
TouchGraph – interactive graphs to help visualise links and for mind mapping.
Trackur – free social media monitoring tools, better than Google Alerts.
Trendistic – find out what the most influential topics of discussion are on Twitter.
Tribe Monitor – measure presence across several different social media platforms.
Twazzup – real-time news based on Twitter focused sentiment, top links etc.
Tweetlevel – measures an individual’s importance on Twitter.
Twendz -helps see who your influencers are on Twitter.
Twitalyzer – Twitter focused tool looking at influence, impact and engagement.
wikio.com - an good alternative to icerocket, decent results