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Exploring Different Listening Tools

You can find tons of different types of monitoring or listening tools that oversee the social-media space. If you work for a large company, you can use large, paid tools such as Radian 6 (www.radian6.com), Sysomos (www.sysomos.com), Alterian (www.alterian.com), Lithium (www.lithium.com), or others. Pricing for these tools runs from a few hundred dollars to the tens of thousands per month. Most individuals and small businesses can't make that investment. If you're one of the smaller guys, you can create your own monitoring service right in WordPress by importing free monitoring tools into your Dashboard to create a social-media listening hub.

Some monitoring tools pick up blog coverage, Twitter remarks, and message board comments. Others pick up content created around video and pictures. Try out these different monitoring services and determine which give you the best results and which make you feel the most comfortable. Then choose the best tools to create a good monitoring mix. One solution probably can't cover everything, so experiment with different combinations of tools.

Most, but not all, of these tools use Boolean search methods, so you need to understand how to narrow down your searches. If you want to combine terms, put an AND between two items (for example, cake AND pie). If you use OR, you can broaden your search — for example, to track ...