The 5 best low cost social media monitoring tools
23. Jan, 2011 
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If you’re looking for the best low cost social media monitoring tool, this is our suggested list of the top five. We’ve tried and tested them all. If you use (or run) a good, low-cost service that isn’t listed, by all means add it to the comments below (stating why it’s good and how much it costs):
Ubervu (www.ubervu.com)
Having started out as a very simple, low-cost service, Ubervu (pictured above) has dramatically improved it’s offering the past 12 months (and doubled it’s prices). At the solo level, costing $49.99, you now get a very easy to use search and dashboard setup offering basic sentiment detection and some nice graphics. If you upgrade to the Plus or Team level ($179.99/$399 per month) or Enterprise (fees on application), you also get a range of management tools.
Viralheat (www.viralheat.com)
One of the best low-cost, or entry-level, social media monitoring tools available, Viralheat provides a “lite” version of what the more expensive dashboards provide, including: search and reporting, graphs, video monitoring (which some more costly tools don’t offer), sentiment detection and influencer analysis (Klout is integrated). Prices range from just $9.99/month to $89.99/month.
Alterian SM2 Freemium Version (SM2.techrigy.com)
Alterian is one of the only high-end dashboard providers to offer a free version of it’s well-regarded service. At the free level you can have up to 1000 search results at any one time. If you want more, you have to delete them – but that’s probably enough for any SME or individual (if they’ve got their search queries set up right). It’s not the easiest tool to figure out, but if you upgrade to the full version ($500+/month), you get support. One unique feature of SM2 is it’s retrospective monitoring reporting.
Google Alerts (google.com/alerts)
Google Alerts are free and simple, so the obvious starting point for most people in monitoring. But they are far from flawless: a recent study by Brandwatch showed that Google Alerts picks up less than 10% of brand mentions and that alerts often appear days (or weeks) late.
Twitter Dashboards
Probably the easiest way to keep track of your brand/name on blogs and Twitter is one of the many free dashboards out there. By setting up keyword searches on Tweetdeck you can track your brand and industry pretty comprehensively, but I prefer MarketMeSuite ($5.99/month), which lets you create geo-located searches and reply templates. It’s much more of a pro-active marketing tool.
If you’re live near London, New York, San Francisco, Toronto or Paris – we’ll be running a social media monitoring conference near you very shortly. Check out our social media monitoring events schedule.
