Here’s my two bits on the social media monitoring tools available today. The ones mentioned in this post are the free tools, but even the paid tools will have mostly the same pluses and minuses.

The positives first – an SMM tool is of course, the best and most logical place to start if you want to track the visibility of a brand or issue. All of them do pull out the posts that match the search term and present the same to you. Some are better organized than others. Icerocket and socialmention.com are two great start points for any search. And of course, there are a plethora of twitter specific tools like twazzup, monitter, twitalyzer and tweetbeep.

Visibility stats or scores are fairly interesting measures as provided by the tools. Of course, one must remember to cross-verify these numbers across tools, so as to not propagate the tool bias. Howsociable has its own visibility score and personally, I find their simple presentation of various SM sources, a great portal page to start the drill-down to the actual comments and posts.

Another interesting graph or chart some of them provide is one that compares the number of mentions of a certain keyword (brand) vs. another. Definitely an indicator of sorts, even if you then use your own methodology to confirm this. Trendpedia is a great example of comparison charting.

Most of the tools will also give some idea of the key influencers who are talking about the brand or issue and that is certainly useful.

My next post will be on what the tools cannot do and why a human analyst is required to derive anything meaningful out of social media monitoring.