What is the best free social media monitoring tool?
When it comes to free social media monitoring, your best friend is your web browser, your RSS aggregator and a few free search engines.
Search Engines
These are search engines that support RSS feeds.
Run a search and copy the RSS feed into your RSS Aggregator.
RSS Aggregator
Feedly allows you to monitor RSS feeds. Put whatever you want in there, from industry news to branded terms to competition.
Web Browser
For the web browser, I highly recommend setting up a unique browser specifically for social listening. You can then run searches on popular social networks and bookmark the URL in your browser.
To start, create a new user. To do this, go to: chrome://settings/ in your Chrome address bar (or just go to the settings). Create a new user.
Next, make sure the bookmark bar is showing. Create bookmarks for Feedly and the following URLs:
- A saved Twitter search for anything you want to monitor. Consider using the advanced search to craft your searches.
- Pinterest for your website – http://pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com
- A saved YouTube search for anything you want to monitor.
- A saved search on any other social media site you use or want to monitor.
That’s it. This is the best way I’ve found to freely monitor the web. If you’re interested in paid tools, check out our post on paid social media monitoring tools: http://www.truevoicemedia.com/what-are-the-best-social-media-measurement-tools/