Page | 1 Deepak Pershad’s Blog MSM G # 5: A Look at 4 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools Many social media contributors on the web have been kind enough to share frequent lists of free social media monitoring tools. I decided to take a look at 4 of these in a little more detail, by using the same search term for all three, and examining the types of results that were generated. The search term was a hot trending topic, i.e. the Apple iPad (the actual term entered was “ipad.”). The 4 tools that were examined were: Addict-o-matic BoardReader Trendistic BlogPulse Each tool searches a little differently, and is focused either on a specific area (e.g. blogs or message boards and forums, or Twitter), or more broadly across content categories. Addict-o-matic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images BoardReader uses proprietary software to allow users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, in order to accurately find and display information contained on the Web's forums and message boards Trendistic is a tool that allows one to track trends on Twitter. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals BlogPulse (available from NM Incite, an A.C. Nielsen-McKinsey collaboration) allows one to generate blogging trends on a selected topic, identify hot blogging topics, and track conversations developing from blogs Here’s how the results were displayed for each tool (See following page):