A quick review of 4 free social media monitoring tools

1. Deepak Pershad’s Blog
MSM G # 5: A Look at 4 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
Many social media contributors on the web have been kind enough to share frequent lists of
free social media monitoring tools. I decided to take a look at 4 of these in a little more detail,
by using the same search term for all three, and examining the types of results that were
generated.
The search term was a hot trending topic, i.e. the Apple iPad (the actual term entered was
“ipad.”). The 4 tools that were examined were:
 Addict-o-matic
 BoardReader
 Trendistic
 BlogPulse
Each tool searches a little differently, and is focused either on a specific area (e.g. blogs or
message boards and forums, or Twitter), or more broadly across content categories.
 Addict-o-matic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts,
videos and images
 BoardReader uses proprietary software to allow users to search multiple message
boards simultaneously, in order to accurately find and display information contained on
the Web's forums and message boards
 Trendistic is a tool that allows one to track trends on Twitter. It gathers tweets as they
are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals
 BlogPulse (available from NM Incite, an A.C. Nielsen-McKinsey collaboration) allows one
to generate blogging trends on a selected topic, identify hot blogging topics, and track
conversations developing from blogs
Here’s how the results were displayed for each tool (See following page):
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2. Addict-o-matic:
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3. BoardReader:
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4. Trendistic:
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5. BlogPulse:
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6. Of the 4 tools reviewed, 3 provide the ability to trend results (BoardReader, Trendistic, and
BlogPulse). While Addict-o-matic reports results of all kinds across the web, it does not
apparently have the ability to provide an aggregate trend of all the product mentions.
Given that the 3 tools that do report on trends report on different information sources, one
would have to develop a composite picture using the data from each tool. Of course, a much
more sophisticated and comprehensive paid service like Radian6 can take your company’s
social media monitoring, planning and execution to a completely different level, through its
comprehensive coverage of the Social Media ecosphere. For those small companies or single
practitioners starting out with Social Media however, these tools can still deliver some value.
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