Three free tools for social media monitoring.

The companies have access to various social media tools that can be used to connect with existing customers and engage with prospects on social media. These tools can be used for social listening, social conversation and social influencing. The companies can gain a competitive advantage through information learned from monitoring social media.

 Here is information about few free social media tools: 

 Socialmention is a no frills, easy to use social listening tool employed by companies with limited budgets. You can use this tool to listen to what people are posting on blogs,  miniblogs and social networking sites by searching for any topic. The search results can be organized by sentiment, influencers, website source, keywords or hashtags and exported in an excel file.

The 10 step tutorial on how to use socialmention can be found at this link.  

 HootSuiteis a social conversation tool used to manage and monitor social media networks. Companies can use hootsuite to discover and respond to customers’ reviews or questions in real-time. At the end of 2013, HootSuite announced that over one thousand companies use their tools. Among them are Sony Music, Virgin, Siemens and EuroStar. HootSuite HQ are located in Vancouver, Canada.

Social influence tools are designed to search for and engage with social media users that are important in particular areas. Social influence tools can also provide information on these very important users and their powers over these areas. One of the free influence tools is peekanalytics. peekanalytics is especially helpful in finding influential Twitter users and their presence on other social media platforms.