If you work in social media marketing or track your companies online presence, you know how difficult it can be to monitor every post, tweet, RSS feed, review, etc. With all the new social media and customer review websites that seem to pop-up weekly, it’s challenging to find the time to track them all and record who is talking about your brand. Social media monitoring tools are extremely helpful at tracking what is being said about your company online, not to mention saving you a lot of precious time.

Like a search engine’s spider-bot, the monitoring software continually listens and scans the Internet alerting you anytime your company, vendors, partners or employees are mentioned online. Should what you find online warrant a direct response, you can quickly respond or remedy the situation. These tools also help organizations determine the ROI on their own social media marketing efforts.

Below is a substantial list of social media monitoring tools along with a brief description of each to help you reach your social media goals. They are listed in no particular order, and of course are not the only ones available, but are some of the most popular.

• Radian6 – Radian6 enables organizations to become Socially Engaged Enterprises with the power to understand and gain insights about social media through metrics, measurement, sentiment and analytics reporting. Their social media listening, tracking, monitoring and engagement tools allow organizations to successfully employ a social media strategy and understand the impact the Social Graph and Social CRM have on their success. Radian6 can also provide advice on how to use social media guidelines, best practices, case studies and training for your staff.
• Wildfire – Wildfire provides numerous plugins and tools to enhance your social media pages and measures your performance with powerful analytics. You have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Their alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.
• Hootsuite – Offers both free and premium social media monitoring tools to help enterprises (such as Lunarpages, The Food Network and Martha Stewart) as well as smaller companies, maximize the reach and efficiency of social media outreach and listening efforts. You’ll be able to manage multiple social profiles, schedule messages and tweets, track brand mentions and analyze social media traffic.
• Addictomatic – Searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.
• Twazzup – A dashboard program that monitors Twitter. Twazzup operates a leading real-time news platform. It alerts you every time your keywords are mentioned in a tweet. It categorizes your results by link popularity, contributors, tagging clouds and users. Unique features like avatar mouse-over gives additional detail about that user’s relevant tweets. Twazzup is a surprisingly powerful and valuable social media monitoring tool.
• TweetDeck – Unifies Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Buzz, Foursquare and MySpace to give you a convenient way to use and monitor social media. What’s nice is that when your keywords are referenced, you have an easy way to quickly respond without having to leave the program. And it has both desktop and mobile apps for several operating systems.
• Social Mention – Allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.
• Sysomos – Brings business intelligence to social media, providing instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations to quickly see what’s happening, why it’s happening and who’s driving the conversations. Through the use of contextual text analytics and data mining technology, Sysomos collects data from blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking sites, message boards, wikis and major new sources.
• Beevolve – Easy-to-use, comprehensive and most affordable social media monitoring and insights platform.
• HowSociable – Provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
• Seesmic – Is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build your brand online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins.
• SocialSeek – Helps brands provide an addicting social experience to their site, driving engagement , revenue and a fan base. It gets all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos etc, on any topic you choose. You can even make your own Socialseek site.
• SocialPointer – Provides real-time social media monitoring tools for marketing agencies & individuals and enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversations.
• Boardtracker – Is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.
• Mentionmapp – This application is specifically for Twitter. With Mentionmapp, discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.
• Trackur – Monitor your reputation, check on trends and analyze your news media mentions for your company, brand or clients. Trackur’s social media monitoring tools are easy to use yet offer a surprising number of features.
• Lithium – Social Media Monitoring that cuts through the noise on the social web and brings you only the most relevant posts from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sources from your most passionate customers. Lithium will help you understand your customers influence, engage their passions, and turn them into super fans; which means they’ll contribute to your company’s marketing, commerce, customer service, and product development activities.
• Klout – Our friendships and professional connections have moved online, making influence measurable for the first time in history. When you recommend, share, and create content you impact others. Your Klout Score measures that influence on a scale of 1 to 100. At least go check out your “Klout Score”.
• Raven Tools – Raven’s Social Media tools give you real-time data, insight and control into your social media efforts. With real-time data you’ll be the first to know who’s talking where (Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, blogs, forums etc) about your brand or keywords and be able to respond immediately. With insight into your social media, you’ll be able to spot trends and analyze content (most effective way to drive traffic to your site). Raven allows you to control all of your social media accounts and who can use them.
• Sprout Social – Their web application integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics and more.

We hope you find this information useful and not too overwhelming. Pick the one(s) that suits your needs the best and give it a try. There are many others on the market and more being developed each day. If you have any experience with these applications (or others), we’d like to hear what you have to say.  Happy social media monitoring!