It's all well and good to have a social media plan in place, but unless businesses are monitoring what's being said about them all that effort can be hard to measure.

Thankfully, there are plenty of handy tools out there to help brands listen, measure and respond to social media sentiment.

Here are five of SMK's favourites.

Raidan6

Radian6 (recently bought be Salesforce) offers social media monitoring and analysis dashboards and services. Across a range of social media listening, tracking, monitoring and engagement tools, Radian6 provides real- time feedback as well as analytic reports into how your social media is performing.
www.radian6.com

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media dashboard and allows for the easy management of accounts across multiple social media platforms. Its features include the ability to post to more than one social media network simultaneously, as well as some basic analysis and reporting functionality. More advanced reporting can be found via HootSuite Enterprise.
www.hootsuite.com

Dialogix

Like Radian6, Australian company Dialogix offers a range of social media monitoring options and reporting tools so you can keep abreast of what’s being said about you and your competitors across the social web.
www.dialogix.com.au

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to track new content relating to specified key words. Whenever Google finds a new result that matches your terms (i.e. news articles, blog posts, etc.), they send you an email. It’s a great way for staying up-to-date about what’s being said about your business and your competitors.
www.google.com/alerts

Social Mention

Social Mention is a free social media search engine. You enter specified topics into a search bar, and Social Mention pulls together all user-generated content relating to your key words into a single information stream.
www.socialmention.com

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