DISQUS

Mashable - The Social Media Guide: 18 Essential Tools for Every Word-of-Mouth Marketer

  • Becky Grant · 1 month ago
    Is it just me or is twitter the base of a lot of these ideas?
    I love twitter to death.

    Do people really make all that much money off these things? I mean... It seems like the ones making the money are the owners of these sites and programs.
  • Eric Pratum · 1 month ago
    I count 6 that are explicitly relevant to Twitter. The rest either don't involve Twitter at all or only peripherally.
  • brian fanslau · 1 month ago
    Twitter = Opinions and the base user essentially (i.e. the Mind of whomever) That is why I believe Twitter has sparked so many of the programs we see in the market place. The programs are attempting to collaborate all or as many minds together to be able to read trends and to market to those minds effectively. It is very intriguing. Much will develop in the future I am sure. Great list Mashable always one of my favorite places to peek into during the day.
  • laurenvargas · 1 month ago
    Thank you for including us in this list of tools. We know there are a lot of options out there...

    Lauren Vargas
    Community Manager at Radian6
    @VargasL
  • Jorge Fiffe · 1 month ago
    I'm curious why there isn't more availability of analytic apps that measure Facebook Word-of-Mouth via sharing, news feed, wall posts, etc. It seems to me that these conversations must be much higher in numbers than tweets.
  • Eric Pratum · 1 month ago
    Facebook keeps most of that information behind the wall. I'm sure that they already have something built to pull that data together or could do it easily, but to the best of my knowledge, they have not made it available via API or anything or way yet.
  • Flavm · 1 month ago
    We use a lot of these tools to monitor my company's website (www.ngagenow.com). As a digital marketing company, these applications help us stay fresh and keep up to date with trends. They also tell us where our weaknesses and strengths are so we can manage our content for better UX.

    Nice Post.
  • Andrew Krebs-Smith · 1 month ago
    But these tools overlap. If you utilize one or two of them, several of the others become redundant.

    The title of this article is misleading - it should be called "18 random tools that can be useful to word of mouth marketers" They ARE NOT essential. Except tweetdeck ;)
  • ClayMcDaniel · 1 month ago
    Fair point, Andrew, and one that I should have addressed in the post by more clearly framing this as 'a long list of *potentially essential* tools that social media marketers and community managers should consider'. Certainly it's not practical for anyone to license/configure as many as 18 different tools or applications. What I wanted to share in the post is a fairly comprehensive list of some of the best apps and tools that we have found to be quite useful (and, yes, in some cases truly Essential) in our work at Spring Creek. However, I could have put a sharper point on the fact that a small, focused portfolio of a select few of these tools - selected to best match the specific requirements of the brand/business/marketer - should usually work well to proactively manage the social media channel. Thanks for the comment, and thanks to everyone else who's added in links to their own preferred alternates as well. The list of social media technology tools is long and illustrious, but locking in on the few that prove to be of highest value to your work and organization is of course the trick and most important task for each of us. Cheers.
  • Tyler Willis · 1 month ago
    Hey Clay -- not sure if you've looked deeply into Facebook tools -- would be happy to give you a tour of the FB Social Marketing Landscape sometime if you like (a long with a demo of our "potentially essential" tool that should be considered) :)

    Facebook is starting to have third-party platforms that support social marketing -- but most aren't as well known as the options for twitter (i think because Facebook has their own solutions for some problems, and gets a lot of the story -- whereas Twitter is only about the ecosystem today).
  • People Search · 1 month ago
    Information overload for marketing busy bodies.
  • Michael Fraietta · 1 month ago
    Another great option is Filtrbox. Check us out here, http://fbx.bz/E

    Michael Fraietta
    Filtrbox
    @mike567
  • Omgili · 1 month ago
    You forgot a very useful resource - omgili.com, it gives you discussions from forums and discussion sites, reviews, buzz graphs and related forums where you can find communities matching your interest.
  • umar · 1 month ago
    These tools will help marketers very much
  • Atle Iversen · 1 month ago
    Very interesting list.

    I highly recommend Google Alerts, but I guess I need to invest an hour or two to learn more about some of these tools :-)
  • Jonathan Weiss · 1 month ago
    ya know. there is no mention to www.socializemedia.com a tool that not only monitors what is going on, but allows you to publish. its a great service. I can't believe people have not found out about them.
  • Jeff Ramos · 1 month ago
    This is great. I just started teaching indie marketing classes in New York City to the "Gen Y" set and this will help me out a lot. Thanks!
  • @JoeHobot · 1 month ago
    Instead of Tweetdeck I use Seesmic it has better grouping options and Facebook integration as well.

    Google Alerts? Not to bad if you are looking for something "specific"
  • Ron Kornfeld · 1 month ago
    We launched www.tweetiator.com so that you can see who is tweeting links to your content in real time. Our users tell us that they're using this to drive marketing programs, surveys, and better relationships with their authoritative visitors.
  • Jeremy Bencken · 1 month ago
    Clay - Finding conversations is step 1. But doing something about them is essential. The hard work is relationship-building, which is why we built BuzzStream to integrate social media monitoring with influencer research tools, team engagement workflow, and outreach tracking. Please check out BuzzStream sometime soon.

    Jeremy Bencken
    Co-founder, BuzzStream
    http://www.buzzstream.com
  • Most Interesting Ideas · 1 month ago
    I know that flash monitoring tools can't view Russian words
  • Francesco Paciocco · 1 month ago
    Great 30,000 ft. sweep of the basic word of mouth and social media measurement tools. While I sort of agree with Andrew in that many of these tools overlap, its up to the marketer to pick a tool set in which each tool looks at a specific metric. For instance, its either Alexa or Quantcast, not both.

    Also, where's TweetVolume for measuring Twitter keyword volume?: http://www.tweetvolume.com
  • Blake Cahill · 1 month ago
    Clay - Appreciate you including us in your list. Many brands and agencies continue to utilize a variety of free and paid applications/technologies in order to accomplish their goals of listening or engagement. Additionally, there's the challenge of interacting with consumers in the social network where they congregate. Glad we've got you as a partner to aid clients with these challenges.
  • Dimple Thakkar · 1 month ago
    Love this article for my business. Still can't figure out which is the best way to track Twitter conversations around my clients, though.
  • Mark Levy · 1 month ago
    Viralheat is worthy of consideration also. http://www.viralheat.com They track Twitter, web sites and viral video all in one dashboard.
  • Davit · 1 month ago
    Hi Guys! I love mashable!

    Can someone help me with this or i can not handle so much information....
    Where is RSS feed for only business category? How do you filter this to get only categories which you want?
  • vidli · 1 month ago
    Hey Clay - Great List. We use a handful of these services at Vidli. Is Monitter really that much better than TweetDeck to have the #1 spot?
  • kunalshah · 4 weeks ago
    thanks for posting this all 18 tools of Social Media - I think this will be very great tools which will work in a daily work!
  • Alan Sherin · 4 weeks ago
    There is another great tool that we have found that virtually no one has heard of yet. It is called POPSOC.com and actually is a network of 100 sites that automatically post on all of the social networks and bookmarking sites without the need to run and manage 100 accounts. It is viral and social media wrapped up in one. We use it and get tons of traffic and backlinks too! Try this for yourself http://bit.ly/13kecz
  • Tilla · 3 weeks ago
    Great list - I can't believe I just found it but now is exactly when I needed it :)
    I also use www.yourversion.com to "listen" since you can put in any Interest or topic/keyword you want to track mentions for, and it shows you content in the channels of News, Blogs, Twitter, etc... And you can also retweet it from there. I'll definitely check out some of the listening and measurement tools you listed - I was looking for free analytics tools, so this is great. Cheers!