Social Media Monitoring Tools Resource Center 

With the explosion of Social Media comes a parallel explosion of real-time search engines. Their value is harnessing all that information in a tidy bundle and arranging it to help searchers find meaning in the results. This search engine is one of the most comprehensive.

Named for the Gold Rush pioneers who came out to California a year before the '49ers, this engine scours Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg and Delicious for keywords and URLs relating to your search.

Too many results? A click on this or that source filters out the networks you don't want. 48ers also presents trending topics and suggests keyword strings if you need help creating the searches you want.

Who's talking about you or reposting your links in their own social feeds? This simple tool retrieves any mentions of your URL even when the post/tweet uses a URL shortener such as tiny.url, bit.ly, ow.ly or goo.gl.

Then – and this is the best part – you can set up an alert for your URL. BackType will deliver all your hits either via email (daily or weekly digests or as they happen) or to the personal dashboard set up for you when you create an account.

BackType offers several other sweet little monitoring and marketing intelligence services, such as the ability to compare two or more URLs for Twitter activity (great for spying on your competitors' activities).

Other SocMed monitoring services also offer alert services, but when you just want to keep it simple – search, analyze and create an alert – this is your tool.

Location, location, location ... that's the next frontier in search, marketing and Social Media monitoring. This search engine from competitive intelligence provider Sysomos helps you monitor chatter about your business or spy on your competition by seeing what visitors or customers are posting on location-based social networks.

Instead of chasing down keywords, FourWhere searches specific locations using the Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla networks, whether you want to search your present location or a different city. You can even get as granular as a specific block.

Once it locks down your location, FourWhere searches for matching data, serving up both venues where users have checked in and comments about those venues.

Suppose you own a travel service in Miami and want to find restaurants for a tour group visiting San Francisco. Zoom to your chosen neighborhood, and watch the map populate with venues. Comments linked to those venues run down the right side of the results page.

Be aware that you'll draw a fair amount of irrelevant data, like people checking in to their own homes, and the comments are not moderated. However, you can filter out venues that have no comments associated with them.

True Social Media success relies on influence, yours as well as your followers. Use this handy tool to benchmark your SocMed clout (and your competitors') to see how you compare and where you need to improve.

Klout reports your results on two tabs. Explore both tabs to view your score between 1 (least) and 100 (most) based on its measures of "True Reach" (how large your engaged audience is), "Amplification" (how likely your messages will be clicked on, replied to or retweeted) and "Network" (your followers' own influence).

Klout also draws a comprehensive profile of your Twitter presence, graphing trends, finding influential people for you to follow and categorizing your SocMed profile, from "Dabbler" to "Specialist." Klout categorizes Web Digest's Twitter account (@LarryChaseWDFM) as a "Curator" because it follows influential people and shares information that regularly gets retweeted. (Thank you!)

Your initial score takes a while to calculate. If it's low, wait a few minutes and refresh the page to see if the number goes up once Klout finishes its calculations. Linking your Facebook profile or Page to your Twitter account also can raise your score.

Although "freemium" social-monitoring tools offer a wealth of data and analysis, they don't offer the kind of search precision or collaboration needed by a company with a large Social Media footprint or more than one person driving the SocMed bus.

Lithium Technologies' ScoutLabs gets the edge here over higher-powered competitors because it walks a fine line: offering the user enough tools to effectively monitor and act on its social presence while not loading up on excessive firepower.

We like the accessible dashboard, which delivers maximum information without inducing data fatigue. It mixes infographics such as graphs for volume (number of mentions) and sentiment (positive versus negative mentions) with snippets of citations pulled from its searches in blog posts and comments, Twitter, discussion forums, YouTube videos, flickr pics, news stories and quotes).

ScoutLabs might be more than you need if your company doesn't have a high profile yet in Social Media, but try the free trial anyway. You'll get to use all the tools the paid customers get for 14 days without giving up your credit card number.

Here's real-time social monitoring on steroids. Social Mention doesn't just flood you with the results; it slices and dices the data to help you make sense of it all.

First, type in your keywords such as your or your competitors' brand, company name or URL. (Yes, it tracks your URL through URL shorteners.) If you want to narrow your search, Social Mention gives you many options to choose categories or specific Social Media sources.

Sort results by date or time period, even down to the last hour, and choose your most relevant sources: blogs (posts plus comments), microblogs, images, news, videos and even question-and-answer forums. Sign up for convenient email alerts to get ongoing results in your inbox, too.

Now, the analysis: Social Mention measures your influence, the passion of your talkers, the ratio of positive to negative comments and how likely you are being discussed in the social mediasphere.

It also aggregates your top referring sources, talkers, Twitter hashtags and keywords, all on a single results page.

Did we mention that, at least at this time of writing, all this data is complimentary?