Want to know who’s talking about you (or your competitors) in online social media circles? Want to know how ‘influential’ you are in social media? Or want to track specific keywords in social media in real-time?

If so, here are five (5) tools for tracking conversations, links and keywords across the online social media spectrum.

Who’s talking about you…

1. Social Mention

Type in a word – e.g. your brand name – and Social Mention will display all mentions of that name across a huge number of social media sources (blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, questions and answers and social media networks). Alternatively, you can isolate tracking to just a few sources.

Social Mention lets you sort results by date and time period, and also gives you an indication of strength, sentiment, passion and reach. It also lists the top keywords used in the results, and the top users, hashtags and sources associated with the results.

On top of this, you can export the results in the form of a CSV file and, in addition to checking out mentions on the Social Mention website, you can also get Social Mention to send you email alerts.

2. BackType

BackType lets you visualize your ‘social impact’ by reporting on Tweets and comments on social media sites that include a given URL (e.g. the URL of your website).

BackType reports on both links that specifically include your URL as well as links shortened by URL shorteners which lead to your URL.

You can also subscribe to BackType Alerts (http://www.backtype.com/alerts) which sends you daily or weekly email digests of instances where your URL has been mentioned in social media discussions.

How influential you are…

3. Klout

Klout aims to measure your overall online ‘influence’ based on your presence and activity on Facebook, Twitter and, most recently, LinkedIn.

Type in your Twitter username and Klout will give you a Klout score, based on where you sit on the ‘influence matrix’. This matrix is divided into 16 quadrants, with your location on the matrix based on how active you are on Twitter and Facebook, along with your level and type of participation.

Klout also shows you which Twitter and Facebook users tend to ‘influence’ you.

Real-time search…

4. 48ers

48ers is a real-time search engine that lets you type in any term and delivers up-to-the-moment results based on the inclusion of that term in conversations across Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg and Delicious.

5. Collecta

Collecta is a real-time social media search engine. Type in a term and Collecta indicates where that term has been used in blog posts, articles, comments, social network updates (Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz), photos (Flickr, TwitPic and Google Buzz) and videos (YouTube and Ustream).

Related Articles:

• Twitter Users Want Companies To Answer Them
• 5 Ways To Measure Social Media Success
• Twitter Is a Drive By Broadcasting Medium
• Four Tools To Monitor The Online Conversation
• Fizziology Lets Entertainment Industry Track Social Media Chatter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Social Media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.