Listening in on the digital chatter is essential to your social media success and company expansion. You need to know about your industry, brand, competitors and trending topics but where do you start? There are hundreds of tools to help you to listen more, engage on a deeper level, troubleshoot, follow trends that influence your business, identify prospects, increase your ROI and to develop your network, all enabling you to grow your business and manage your online reputation as a thought leader.

Creating your online brand and reputation requires active listening, not just pushing content.  The variety of platforms is exhaustive so choose a few, set up keyword alerts and monitor the content and voice in your stream.  Test drive some of the FREE tools listed below to begin listening and analyzing your social media marketing efforts.

Develop your goals and strategy with a few tips in “Social Media Monitoring: Horton Hears a Whos”

Here is a great infographic about social media monitoring tools. If you scroll to the bottom of the image, you will see many of the ones mentioned in this post.

FREE Social Media Monitoring Tools

Bottlenose  Real-time social intelligence engine searching social media with up to the minute news

Engag.io Monitor and engage in your online conversations on one platform. “Your Inbox for Online Conversations and Relationships.”

FollowerWonk Find, analyze and optimize your Twitter following

Google Alerts  Receive email alerts based upon your keywords

Google Reader Harvest relevant content, RSS feeds, blog posts and websites

Guzzle Topic based news aggregator monitoring hundreds of feeds

Monitter Twitter real time keyword search

Social Mention  Monitors 100 + social media sites bringing you all social media results relevant to your search query (keywords)

Topsy  Search and analyze the social web

Twazzup  Real time Twitter search engine

TweetLevel  Keyword search, analyze and engage: Identify top Twitter influencers, real time keyword and hashtag insight, company buzz

Twtrland Visualizes social footprints; use keywords, hashtags @ name

Twubs Search industry and trending hashtags

Uvrx Social search using keywords, hashtags, names, brands

WhosTalking  Social Media search tool, combining data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways

Your turn: what are some of your favorite tools or suggestions?