Those B2Bs holding out on social media in the belief that it’s too cumbersome and time-consuming may soon be running out of excuses. The social networks themselves are becoming ever more business-friendly, and a plethora of tools is springing up to streamline the usage and management of social-media programs. We’ve posted several samplings of such tools, the most recent just a few weeks back.
So it was good to come across a review of 14-odd such tools that Adam Holden-Bache posted on Social Media B2B. We thought we’d just pull out and list here the subset of Adam’s list that are available free (at least for now)…
Social Mention is a real time search platform that allows you to search on a keyword (/phrase) and view its mentions across 100+ social media properties. It offers a strength score, sentiment ratio, a “passion” score, and reach.
Swix is a social web index, allowing you to create “pods”, a way to see your metrics for a particular social media property (Twitter, YouTube, your own blog, LinkedIn, etc.). Then for each property, you enter your amount spent and your cost per unit, and then see your return on investment. Simple.
Addictomatic instantly creates a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic. Choose your channels (social media properties), then save your search as a bookmark. It’s a great way to determine the buzz about your product or service, find potential audience, and see which channels are sources of content for your keywords/phrases.
Samepoint is the Conversation Search Engine, geared towards following the conversation around a particular subject. When you search, your results appear in a stream of content that provides snippets of the conversation, along with the symbol of the social site where the conversation is taking place. Includes many sorting options, including real-time, bookmarks, wikis, networks, groups, microblogs and news.
Howsociable allows you to measure a brand’s visibility in social channels. It gives you a Visibility Score, and then you can choose to subscribe via email to track changes on a monthly basis. It’s a useful tool to locate the channels in which you or your competition has visibility.
Blogpulse allows you to see what’s hot in the blogosphere, and find blog posts on any given subject or topic. Its Trend Search graphs your search results based on how often they appear in blogs; this can help you monitor the frequency of blog mentions of your business, product/service or competitors over time.
Folowen is a social media search tool that aggregates social profiles of people and organizations across 27 social networking sites into one search result. You can use it to find and monitor your competition.
Links to the above tools – plus a number of fee-based ones we didn’t have space for here – can be found in Adam’s post. And if your B2B is committing to a social media program, the Social Media B2B blog is one you’ll surely want to add to your RSS reader.
It constantly surprises me how much Social Media websites has an impact on the amount of traffic that you can get when done correctly
Keep up the great work,
Rob