10 free social media monitoring sites you should try

Editor’s Note: We are running this story again as part of our look back to the top social media stories of 2011 on Ragan.com. If these sites are no longer new to you, please suggest a new one that may not be on your peers’ radar.

As more businesses turn to social media, communicators need to find monitoring tools to track and measure social media visibility and trends. Quite a few of these tools are available for free. Here is a roundup of my top favorite free social media monitoring websites.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts are e-mailed (or you can subscribe to the RSS feed) alerts of Google results.

Step 1: Type in the search term.

Step 2: Pick which kind of search type you want: News, blogs, Web, video, groups, or comprehensive (which includes all of the above search platforms).

Step 3: Pick how often you want the updates (As it happens, once daily, or once a week)

Step 4: Pick the e-mail length (up to 20 results or up to 50 results).

Step 5: Pick whether to deliver it to your e-mail inbox or as a feed.

Step 6: Hit subscribe.

2. Technorati