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There are many reasons to search social media including monitoring
for brand and reputation management purposes. Smart online marketers
have also been using social search for other reasons including
competitive research and opportunistic content marketing through social
keyword trends.
Most advice on how companies should be listening to the social web
with minimal cost involves monitoring individual services, which is
inefficient. Premium social media monitoring services do this much
more effectively but can be expensive. Here are 6 free social search
tools that may help small businesses make their initial foray into
searching the social web more productive while keeping costs to a
minimum.
Delver is
a “socially connected” search tool in alpha, that is based on your
friends influence on content, i.e. drawing upon the “wisdom of crowds”
to filter the universe of search content. You first identify your
social profiles and can then add more specific information to then
identify your own social graph. Facebook is emphasized. Search results
are then influenced by your network. If Google ever buys Facebook then
this service might be an attractive target.
WhosTalkin? not to be confused with “Who U Stalkin”, is a social media search tool by Joe Hall
that allows users to search for conversations around topics of
interest. Queries are performed against all sources but you can search
on specific social services organized by: Blogs, News, Networks,
Videos, Images, Forums and Tags. The list of practicing SEOs that beta
tested this tool includes some genuine smarties so this one may be
worth watching since saved searches, RSS feeds and other features found
in the tools below are not yet rolled out.
Samepoint
is a social conversation search engine that segments search by: Social
Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks,
Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video,
Images, News and Web or all. Each search result extracts sentinment
and keywords as well. In fact, there’s a trending social search
term page which I think is very interesting. The Discussion Points
feature is interesting because it shows the most commented content in
the search results according to your query and the number of sources.
socialmention
allows you to search a term on specific categories of the social web
including: Blogs, Microblogs, Bookmarks, Comments, Events, Images,
News, Video or All. There’s also a Social Rank score based on the
number of mentions every 4 weeks and you can subscribe to search
results via RSS.
Serph,
from ACS, has been around for several years and searches on blog search
engines, social news and bookmarking websites such as Bloglines, Digg,
Google Blog Search, YouTube, Topix, Sphere, Yahoo Answers, Flickr and
Delicious. Serph is a bit slow but can be useful to cross check queries
with other services and you can subscribe to search results via RSS.
OneRiot
is a bit like Delver in that it uses your social network to influence
the search universe for your query but takes heavy consideration of
what’s currently popular within your network when sorting search
results. Topics that are “emerging” or “surging” are indicated as such
in the search results. OneRiot is alpha at the moment, but has promise.
Nearly all social media monitoring tools are keyword based and use
some kind of crawler or data aggregator to harvest information and then
various schemes to organize and sort as search results or monitoring
reports. Each social search tool has unique features, whether it’s
crawling the social web at large or filtering by your network. One or
more of the 6 tools above might be right for you to start tracking
conversations about your company, brands and even your competition.
From a marketing standpoint, social search tools like those above
create additional content and marketing opportunity discovery options
for real-time situations, that most standard search engines can’t
compete with.
There have been numerous efforts made with tools like Custom Google Search Engines, Yahoo Pipes and home grown programming to create low cost or free social search tools, but what other free tools have you found to be effective at searching multiple sources of social content on the web?
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