There are many companies that track your brand, company and name through social media, but most of them are quite costly. However there’s one site that gives you a pretty good indication of how you’re doing, and it comes at my favorite price: free!

It’s called socialmention.com

SocialMention.com allows you to search on anything,a brand name, a company name, your name, or your site, and see social mentions of it from 80+ social media properties including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.

In response to that search you get a linked summary of the search, and 4 other measurements:

• Strength: the likelihood that your brand or topic is being discussed in social media. It does this by calculating the total number of mentions of your searched terms within the last 24 hours divided by the total possible mentions.
• Sentiment: the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative. They remove neutral statements from the equation.
• Passion: measures the likelihood that people who are talking about your term are doing so repeatedly. So, if many of your users talk about your term several times, your score will be higher than if they only mention your term once.
• Reach: the number of unique authors that mention your search term divided by the total number of mentions.

Here’s an example search on Tiger Woods. At the moment, he’s got pretty good strength at 24% and amazing reach at 25%. However his sentiment is 3:1, so he’s getting only 3 positive comments for every negative one. He does have good passion at 34%. Unfortunately, when you look at passion in relation to sentiment, it’s likely that passion could be significantly negative. (Wish there was some kind of cross tab option here – positive passion, negative passion and netural passion would be nice!)

By scrolling down, you can see the numbers of people used to calculate the sentiment factor, top keywords associated with your term in the last 24 hours (valuable!), top users, top hashtags used in posts referencing your term, and the sites where your term is mentioned. You can also download these numbers in CSV format from the right side of the page.

Remember that, though you can see how many total mentions there are in the center column, the left column only reflects the past 24 hours. So, these numbers will vary widely, depending on what the public is saying about you on any given day. This variability is both good and bad – good because you get the ability to quickly read swings in perception. Bad, because you do not have the option to request them from a different/longer time period.

You also have the option, from the links at the top, to focus into certain types of media.

How to use socialmention.com

I recommend that you:

• Sign up for daily alerts on your term, enabling you to track changes from day to day. (See the alert button at the bottom of the page.)
• Track your site and your blog separately
• Add it to your firefox search dropdown box, so it’s easy to access at any time (Again, it’s at the bottom of the page – Install Search Plugin)
• Track yourself, your competition, your category, and your brands
• Install and use the realtime buzz widget on your your blog or site. (Currently on the homepage.)

Conclusion: cool tool, right price, certainly gives you an indication of where you are without buying reports from the more high-priced services.

I recommend it!

What do you use to track your social media online? Do you find socialmention.com helpful? What else would you like to see? Tell us about it by posting a comment below.