Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

74. What Brand-Monitoring Tools Can I Use?

Both free and premium tools for brand monitoring fill the market. For most personal or small brands, the combined use of various free services is often enough to get a good picture of what is said about the brand online. There are premium services, however, with fairly low rates that can achieve the same results as the free tools but with more efficiency. The suggested tools for your business can depend on how much time you have to put into monitoring your brand and how much money you have available in your budget.

Free Tools

For small businesses or consultants, and even some larger businesses, there is not usually much in terms of financial resources available for social media monitoring tools. Because the whole concept of social media is still fairly new to most businesses, marketing budgets haven't had time to adjust to the costs associated with managing online brands. Free tools are available for brands that need to start analyzing data without placing a huge dent in their budgets.

Google Alerts

Google has a free tool called Google Alerts that you can use in many different ways. This service emails you when new web pages are published relevant to the keyword or phrase that you entered for the alert.

Go to /www.google.com/alerts. Here you can find a simple box to fill out to get alerts emailed to you, when it finds new results for keywords ...