With the growth in usage of the social media marketing and companies actively participating in sites such as twitter, facebook, digg, etc, there is a growing need for companies to monitor what people are writing about them online.

There are many online tracking tools to do this but the all only seem to monitor certain elements.  Others are positioned as Online PR tracking tools, which to some extent this is what it is, but at the end of the day, it’s about what some conversation people have had about a particiular company / article /blog posting etc.

Some good examples of free social media tracking tools would be:

Google Alerts - get email updates from relevant Google results (news, blogs etc)

Tweet scan - get updates from twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time

However you still have to trawl through the alerts you receive in your inbox and work out which are important or ones that you can ignnore.

I came across Brandwatch which is a great online tool for pulling all this information from social media sites into one interface and allows you to track your competitors - and tells you if the chat is good or not! it even segments the data so you can view it by media (blogs, news, forums etc). How refreshing to find some technology that solves the hassle of the tracking and makes the information easy to interpret.

Tags: social media marketing, social media tracking