7 B2B Social Media Tools You Haven’t Heard Of
By Adam Holden-Bache
Wed, Apr 7, 2010
With the vast array of social media tools out there, it’s easy for some useful ones to get lost in the mix. Here’s a few that might be flying below the radar, but can be valuable tools for B2B marketers.
1. Social Mention
http://www.socialmention.com
Cost: Free
For those of you that use Google Alerts you may want to take a look at Social Mention. Social Mention is a real time search platform that will allow you to search on a keyword/phrase and see its social mentions across 100+ social media properties. It offers a strength score, sentiment ratio, a passion score and reach. This stream of information can be fed into your RSS feeds or be delivered to your inbox. It also displays Top Users, Top Hashtags, and Sources. It’s a great addition to your listening toolbox.
2. Flowtown
http://www.flowtown.com
Cost: Free trial, monthly fees based on imported contacts and email volume
When all you have is an email address, Flowtown can give you a name, age, gender, occupation, location and all the social networks that person is on. It’s a great resource if you need to append your customer file with social network profile information, learn more about the social habits of your database or if you want to target them on social networks.
3. Compendium Blogware
http://www.compendium.com
Cost: Varies depending on number of keywords
You should consider Compendium if you rely on your blog for SEO results. Compendium’s Blogware product helps you target keywords because it automatically organizes your content in a way that’s ideal for search engines to crawl. It also has great administrative tools with a step-by-step approval process so you can manage your blog content within your organization.
4. Trackur
http://www.trackur.com
Cost: Free for 1 saved search, plans for multiple saved searches
Trackur is a social media monitoring tool that provides an impressive set of features at very reasonable costs. You can save searches which are updated every 30 minutes, receive alerts via RSS or email, bookmark and save discovered items and track sentiment and trends. You can try it for free which includes one saved search, so its easy to give it a test run to see if its right for you, and if so just upgrade into one of the paid plans.
5. Swix
http://www.swixhq.com
Cost: Free (for now)
Swix is your social web index. It allows you to create pods, which is a way to see your metrics for a particular social media property (Twitter, YouTube, your blog, Flickr, MySpace, etc.) Then for each property, you can enter your amount spent, your cost per unit and then see your return on investment. It’s simple to use. For a great review of Swix, read Jay Baer’s post A Social Media Scoreboard that Works.
6. Addictomatic
http://addictomatic.com
Cost: Free
Addictomatic instantly creates a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic. Pick the channels where you want to source your information then save your search as a bookmark. It’s a helpful way to determine the buzz about your product or service, find potential audience and to see what channels are sources of content for your keywords/phrases.
7. Spiral 16
http://www.spiral16.com
Cost: N/A
Spiral 16 offers 3D Visual Mapping. Their visualizer displays the relationships between unique URLs in dynamic 2D and 3D maps. This enables users to quickly identify key influencers who are spreading a positive, negative, or neutral message about a topic across the Internet. It can help you discover trends, identify targets, measure campaigns and sentiment and increase customer loyalty.
Are there any other tools you find useful in your B2B marketing research, monitoring or ROI calculations? Leave us a comment with your favorites.
Adam Q. Holden-Bache is the CEO/Managing Director of Mass Transmit, an Internet Marketing Agency specializing in email marketing, web development and social media marketing. Follow Adam on Twitter @adamholdenbache.
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Tags: addictomatic, B2B, compendium, flowtown, Google Alerts, social mention, spiral16, swix, trackur
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Thanks for the list. Some I hadn’t heard of, but definitely had heard of Trackur.
Thanks for the shout out!
Nice post Adam. Thanks for the link, too. How do you find socialmention.com vs. trackur.com?
Jay-
Even though they have similar features I use them different- perhaps due to the way they market themselves. I’ve been using Social Mention as an alert tool and Trackur for monitoring. But there is a good bit of overlap with sentiment info, influence/reach, etc. Trackur offers the ability to edit sentiment, which is useful. I see your point here – perhaps a comparison of the two will make for a good future post…
Adam
Good post, we use a few of those. What’s your favorite monitoring tool? We were looking at Radian 6 – I’m looking for opinions on what’s the most efficient.
Adam, appreciate being mentioned in the list! I’m assuming being a friend of Jay helped in our nomination
… he’s been a great supporter!
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/email-marketing-advice/integrating-email-and-social-media-with-flowtown/
Dan
Co-Founder
@danmartell
Hi Adam-
Thanks for including Spiral16. For B2B specifically, our breath of data is really important. We’re is not limited to only social media. We pick up data from reference sites, directories, non-traditional trade publications – to give an accurate idea of the space.
cheers,
Eric Melin
@Spiral16 @SceneStealrEric
Great post! I’m working on a social strategy for a fairly large B2B and this is going to help a lot! Thanks for posting!!
Elizabeth-
You’ll probably need to try a couple monitoring tools to figure out what’s most efficient for you. Your budget, number of searches and level of analysis required will likely steer you towards an appropriate choice. Radian 6 is a great product, so definitely explore it as an option. If its more than you need right now, Trackur and Viral Heat may be worth considering. Good luck!
Adam
guess you mean http://www.swixhq.com/SWIX.html on #5
Adam,
Another tool for B2B social media is Sysomos Heartbeat, a social media monitoring and measurement service. It features automated sentiment, geo-demographics and integration with salesforce.com. More information can be found here: bit.ly/aTFfoP
cheers, Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
@sysomos
Pix:
Thanks the correction on the Swix URL. It has been fixed.
Thanks that really handy having that list… I think it’s really important to monitor the client’s brand, their competitors and keywords that best define who they are. That way you’ll also get an idea of the buzz being created around your client. Much easier to start the campaign as well as define who your target audience. We’ve had some great success rates when coming to Social Media campaigns. In fact you might be interested in the case studies over on the main B2B Marketing Website or http://www.b2bm.biz/knowledgebank/social-media/
Thanks for the list – I just discovered Addict-o-matic and I think it’s a great tool.
Hello there, I recently published an indepth review of free reputation management tools, including socialmention and addictomatic, this is available here: http://bit.ly/9gbJTE
Anne-
Great post. Your reviews and feature comparison matrix should prove helpful to those interested in researching reputation management tools. Thanks for sharing!
Adam
Just tried addict-o-matic and we all now love it… though inevitably not all the returned content is relevant/current. But looks great and works as a snapshot across media platforms:)
Very useful Adam! I went ahead and visited each of these sites to see if there would be a fit for my recon and analytics. Suffice to say, most of these are good aggregators of social media content. The Reputation sites seem to be somewhat useful and the Swixapp is very nice!
Hi Adam,
I happened to find your article and I’m glad I did, I hadn’t heard of Flowtown; I had heard of some of the others but they are always fun to play around with. I work for Synthesio which unfortunately isn’t as easy to play around with on your own, but I can definitely fill you in on all the good info about some quality web monitoring if you’ve got a minute
Best, Michelle @Synthesio
Flowtown!! Definitely an awesome tool that can give anyone a ton of info on the people on their contact list.
Social Mention is also great, as it helps us know whenever we’re mentioned, and allows us to stay on top of our social presence.
Also, check out Fan ReTargeting – http://www.fanretargeting.com – it serves ad units that allows people to like your brand on Facebook DIRECTLY from the ad. Furthermore, the ad’s targeted only to people who have visited your website.
Wow! Great list! Thanks
Wow, what a great resource. Always looking for new ways to track and do research. I didn’t know about some of these. Thanks!
Escapee DJ
@the925escape
Thanks for sharing this. Although it is a little slow, I already see that socialmention.com is definetly becoming important to me.