Top 4 free social media monitoring & listening tools

Everyone wants to know where are they being mentioned online!

Tracking your mentions on social media is easier with the ability to tag an account.

But what if someone just writes your brand name, or mentions you in their blog, without tagging your brand or linking to your website. It becomes tough to track such mentions.

Social media monitoring and listening tools will help you track your mentions. We've listed down some free tools where you can monitor your brand, competitor's brand, any keyword, or any other brand that you want to track.

Brand Grader Brand Grader powered by Mention is a free online reputation management tool. It monitors and analyzes the online reputation of a brand on social media and the web. It gives you an overview of the brand mentions on social and the web location-wise, sources, and graphically and detects brand sentiment too.

Along with monitoring and analyzing, you can also export and share the results of your brand analysis. It allows you to embed the graph as well.

Google Alerts With Google Alerts, you can monitor your brand on Google Search. This includes blogs, web, news, and discussions. Create a Google alert and you get all the mentions in your inbox. Google Alert gives you the option to filter out the mentions based on the following:

• How often you get notifications

• Sources (blogs, news, discussion, video, etc)

• Language

• Region

• How many results you want to see

• What accounts get the alert

Unfortunately, Google Alerts doesn't monitor social media platforms.

Talkwalker Alerts Talkwalker Alerts monitor online conversations on the web, newspaper articles, forums, blogs, and Twitter. It uses Boolean operators to narrow down the search results so that you only receive relevant mentions. All the mentions are consolidated and sent in email.

Mention Mention lets you set alerts, monitor online conversations, and schedule and publish your posts. It monitors mentions on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the web. It uses complex boolean operators to filter search results. It analyzes the data and generates reports.

It has both free and paid plans. Mention's free plan lets you set 1 brand/ keyword alert, and monitor 3 social accounts limited to 1000 mentions per month. It monitors the web, news, forums, blogs, Instagram, and Twitter. It also has paid plans. You can check the paid plans here.

With the help of the tools we've mentioned above, you can keep a close watch on your brand, competitor brand, or any industry-related keyword. Apart from tracking your mentions, some of these tools also analyze and provide a report on your brand mentions, brand sentiment, etc. These tools help in running a successful social media account. If you want to know more about how to run a social media account, enroll in our program Social Media Bootcamp.