How to find conversations on the social media for free
All social media practitioners need to monitor the Web for conversations made about their brands and products. Most don't want to pay for it.
While Google is the almighty, it returns a lot of non-conversational result such as corporate websites and even splogs. Here's a list of new, and some obscure, specialised search engines that you can use to better track online conversations for free.
- WhosTalkin is something I recently discovered. Their goal is to "deliver the most relevant and current conversations happening in the world of social media." This is a very interesting service in my opinion and has the potential to be very huge. I know it tracks Twitter and some blogs (not sure how many) from my test, but I'm not sure what their complete indexed universe looks like.
- Ask.com's Q&A Search is still in beta but is already one of my favourites. It indexes questions and matches it to the best answer it can find. While it obviously indexes Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers very well, I was blown away when it picked up a question on a local tech forum and tried to find an answer to it.
- While Web 2.0 has given much prominence to conversations on blogs, Web 1.0 discussion forums still hold most of the gems. BoardReader is my favourite forum serch engine. Not that I'm in the movie business, but I like how it has an IMDB search.
- Twitter Search very simply searches Twitter. But seeing how fast Twitter is growing, this is definitely a must have for any practitioner.
- It's been argued that Google BlogSearch is the #1 blog search engine. But Icerocket is the one I like. Works really fast, is evolving quickly with RSS feeds and trending tools, and I'm a real fan of its timeline interface.
