One of the hottest marketing topics this year has been, and will continue to be,  social media, especially when it comes to how it can be applied to B2B. Just see for yourself:

And given the current economic situation, it’s no surprise. In terms of direct costs, many social media efforts are essentially free to dip your toe in the water. However, in terms of man hours or how to measure these efforts, many marketers are having difficulty finding the right mix of tactics, how to allocate resources, and measurement criteria, but that’s another story for another time. In any case, one of the tactics you are probably using is Twitter, due to its increasing rate of adoption across most age demographics. As part of any social media engagement, you should be actively listening to your audiences and the spaces they frequent and an inexpensive way to do this is via the numerous Twitter listening tools available these days. Below we’ve provided ten tools to make visualizing, analyzing, and listening to Twitter much, much easier.

1. Twitter Search – It’s the most basic and most obvious, but this tool now allows for RSS feeds as well as filtering based on language.
2. Google Trends – Although this is listening to a broader audience than just Twitter, it may give you predictive data which can be employed within your social media strategy.
3. Yahoo Pipes – This is a great tool which allows you to put together multiple data streams into one coherent data feed to be emailed or downloaded via CSV or XML.
4. Filtrbox – This is a great tool I’ve been using for a while for both brand monitoring as well as competitive monitoring. They have both paid and free subscriptions.
5. Trackur – Tracking provides a lot of archival data so you can see trends and analytics over time. They don’t have a free option, but do have low cost options on a subscription basis.
6. Twist – Free site for Twitter visualizations over time.
7. Twitter Browser – Free application to view whom is connected to whom. Good for relational analysis and velocity of a users network.
8. Tinker.com – Tinker.com allows for you to create “events” which are online hubs to monitor keyword specific traffic. You can also monitor if specific people mention certain keywords as well as filter based on negative keywords (i.e. I want to see mentions of “3G networks”, but not iPhone). You can see an example here.
9. Tweetstats – If you want to research a specific user, you can see how often they post, when they post, and who they retweet (i.e. who influences them) and plan accordingly.
10. Radian6 – One of the most widely used solutions out there. They provide tag clouds and numerous sorting metrics as well as robust reporting tools to be used as you see fit.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can become more involved in social media or if you’re interested in how you can get more out of your existing social media efforts, please feel free to contact us today.