Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporate. Years ago, when people use to talk about our brands, it has always remained behind our backs and we almost never know about it. But today, we can keep an eye on any feedbacks or comments where our brands may be cited as astronomical!

Listening to the buzz around you brand is not only important from a reputation management standpoint, but also because it serves as a way to better understand ways of improving your brand.

I have compiled here some good tools that you can use to monitor online buzz for your brands and the best thing is these are all FREE tools.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

You can do so much more with Google Alerts, especially for marketing purposes. It lets you find leads, and monitor your competitors. Most importantly, it is a real-time source of the sites Google thinks are most authoritative.

Features:

• Monitoring a developing news story
• Keeping watch on current competitor or industry
• Getting the latest updates on a celebrity or event
• Keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

wikiAlarm

wikiAlarm is an online tool that lets you track Wikipedia edits on the pages that interest you and get email alerts whenever someone edits any of the pages. The application is easy to use and you can monitor unlimited number of pages. Simply register on the site and add a list of the pages you want to track. WikiAlarm will notify you via email as soon as any change is detected.

Features:

• Track unlimited pages
• Monitor your products & brand names as well as competitors
• Pages monitored every hour 24 hours a day 7 days a week
• Send the email alerts to as many people as you like
• Emails include full visibility on changes made

Twilert

Twilert is like the Google alerts for twitter search. Just enter the keywords that are of your interest and twilert would send you regular updates on these keywords by searching twitter using the twitter search API.

It’s useful for those that want to track conversation and opinion on a brand, company or product on Twitter but don’t have the time to sit in front of a Twitter Search page 24 hours a day.

Features:

• Monitor Twitter conversations for specific keywords get alerts via email.
• Monitor as many words as you like.
• Choose how often you want to receive alerts.
• Use advanced settings to refine keywords and alerts by location, by user and more.

Yacktrack

Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon and Wordpress blogs. For instance, if you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation.
My favorite feature of this tool is the “Chatter” tab, which allows you to perform keyword searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand name. Yacktrack’s search page results also give you an RSS feed for the search term.

Features:

• Allows you to perform keyword searches on social media sites
• Notifies you of instances of your brand name
• Also give you an RSS feed for the search term

Yahoo! Alerts

Yahoo! Alerts is a free, personalized notification service that instantly informs you of what you consider important and relevant via email, instant message, pager, or cell phone. To take advantage of this service, you can sign in (or sign up to get a Yahoo! account) and customize your Yahoo! Alerts content and how it is delivered to you.

Features:

• Receive news as soon as it happens.
• Receive forecasts for the cities you select.
• Monitor your products & brand names as well as competitors

About Author:

Hiren Ponkia is a SEO Consultant and the author of the SEO Addicted blog. Actively association to the Search Engine Marketing since last 5 years has helped Hiren to develop the understanding & foresight of today’s online market trends, leading to achieve the pinnacle top in the SERP’s as well as the conversion game.

Get social with Hiren at Sphinn | Twitter

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