Let one of these social media monitoring tools help you filter out the noise and listen to what people are saying about your brand online.

“It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners.”-Brian Solis, The Social  Media Manifesto. Social media monitoring tools are quickly becoming a lot less of an option and more of an essential tool for both individuals and companies. Conversations are being held in the vast world of media web with little regulation of what is being said, and no longer can we choose to be ignorant of these conversations. On the contrary, we must join them.

Of course, not everyone has the same monitoring needs and as a result there are a variety of different tools available with prices that range from absolutely free of charge to thousands of dollars. A beginner blogger might just want to know who’s sharing his/her blog posts with friends on social networking sites, where on the other hand, a large corporation might need a more extensive service that monitors mainstream news, blogs, forums, social media and more across multiple keywords and filters with analytics and reporting features.

Bottom line, it’s okay that you can’t be everywhere at once because your social monitoring service can be. So take the plunge and sign up for the tool that’s right for you and your business. To help you get started, here are a few different options that Wicked recommends, which are perfect for any budget.

Free Services:

• Google Alerts: Google Alerts is a great place to start and it’s free. It can be used for multiple purposes and is best suited for those who just wish to have a basic monitoring of either one or few online sources. It’s as quick and easy as google search, but conducts more specific searches. By simply filling in a search term, your email address and selecting a type of search from either blogs, news, web, groups or comprehensive search, you can filter your search as narrow as you would like. Google Alerts also gives you the option of receiving emails with the following frequency levels: as-it-comes, once a day or once a week. You can also receive up to 50 results in each email.
• Social Mention: “It’s like Google Alerts but for social media.” Social Mention is also free and sends you email alerts of whatever you are monitoring, whether it is your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, developing news story or a competitor. Social Mention goes one step further than Google Alerts and actually gives you data that can be broken or sorted into categories including: likely hood that your search is being mentioned in social media, the ratio of mentions that are positive to the amount that are negative, the percentage of people who talk about your brand and will do so repeatedly, and a measure of the range of influence your brand has.
• Alterian SM2: The free version of SM2 is a social media monitoring tool that was designed specifically for PR and Marketing agencies to measure social media. It monitors a wide range of social media channels like blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-time alerts and allows you to create up to five profiles that store up to 1,000 search results. Unlike Google Alerts and Social Mention, SM2 retrieves more than just keyword search results and gives you multiple types of analysis and reporting such as comparison charts, reports that identify daily volume, demographics, location and the sentiment of what is being said.

Paid Services listed by price from lowest to highest:

• Trackur: As their tagline states “60-second reputation monitoring. Guaranteed!” Trackur scans millions of web pages including blogs, images, forums, etc. and notifies you of any keywords findings or related interest items. Trackur offers four different levels of service: personal, corporate, enterprise and agency. Each includes an unlimited number of results and an update frequency of every 30 minutes, but they vary greatly in the numer of active searches. Personal accounts runs for $18/month for five active searches at a time along with other tools such as full media monitoring, sentiment tagging and trending charts to name a few. Corporate accounts and Enterprise accounts offer everything that personal accounts have to offer, but with an additional 25 active searches for $88/month, while Enterprise accounts allow you to have 250 active searches for $197/month. The last account type is Agency, which runs for $297/month with unlimited active searches along with a co-branded dashboard, co-branded URL and direct client logins.
• Brands Eye: Brands Eye not only tracks and monitors every online mention with multiple tracking tools, but also provides you with a real-time reputation score for both your brand and your competitors. Duplicate mentions are excluded by the filter created based on pre-determined criteria, and users can rank the mentions in order based on those that require immediate attention to be viewed first. Brands Eye offers three unique packages to meet your needs. Blogger only cost $1 and runs five phrases twice a day, while Small Business cost $95 with 20 phrases that are updated every six hours, and lastly there is the Enterprise package which cost $350 and includes unlimited phrases that are updated every hour.
• Radian6: Radian6 allows you to listen, measure and engage in conversations online. It scans over 100 million sites including mainstream news, blogs, videos, social media, etc. in real time, so that you can be aware of who is talking about your brand and recognize who are the influential people in your industry. Radian6 stands apart from the other monitoring tools in that it offers comprehensive analytics and allows for deep filtering, social media metrics, and data segmentation in order to help make educated decisions. Radian6 starts at $500 per month, per profile for up to 10,000 new monthly results on an unlimited amount of keywords.