Boost your Business with Web 2.0

After my presentation at the ICSP conference on last week, someone shared a tool for tracking mentions of your brand/name on social media – but couldn’t remember the exact name. I’ve tracked it down and it’s Social Mention. It’s a real-time social media search and analysis tool – free to use of course. You can go to the website and run a search on any term – or set up an alert (similar to Google alerts).

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

A search will give you all of the mentions of your brand over any period of time you want to specify as well as a series of measures such as strength, sentiment, passion and reach – as below:

Here are a few more tools that will monitor keywords/brands for you.

Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. Type in your brand and you get the following data. (I searched on the word Qantas.)

You can refine the search to certain applications by clicking on the links in the ‘Social Mentions’ tab ie Real-Time, Discussion Points, Bookmarks etc.

A few others you might like to look at are Spy, IceRocket, BackType.

There are also some good Twitter analysis tools:

Twitter Search will allow you to run a simple word search or you can use ‘Advanced Search‘ to define certain criteria eg words, people, places, dates etc. You can also analyse sentiment in a simple way by checking for the smiley or frowny emoticons.

Twitter Sentiment is a graduate school project from Stanford University which allows you to research the sentiment for a brand, product or topic. Type in your band name and it will bring you the following data:

1. A simple pie chart of mentions – positive and negative a bar chart showing numbers.

2. A graph of mentions over any period you want to define:

3. The actual tweets over any period of time you want to specify.

Twitrratr searches for negative and positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic. It gives you the following data – with every tweet listed under the respective column. (I ran this search on Qantas.)

Twendz highlights conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does the twendz application by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute by minute. The following is how it looks. (Again – searched on Qantas.)

And by the time I’ve finished writing this there are probably more tools! Please share your favourites in the comments section.