Social Media Search

There are a number of different reasons to search social media. Some reasons include monitoring for brand and reputation management purposes. Intelligent online marketers have also been using social search for other reasons including competitive research and opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends.

Premium social media monitoring services listen to the social web effectively but they can be expensive. I'm going to offer you a few free social search tools that can help small businesses make their initial foray into searching the social web more productive while keeping costs low.

The first one I'll talk about is Delver. This is a tool that is based on your friends' influence on content. For example, drawing on the wisdom of crowds to filter the universe of search content. You first identify your own social graph. Facebook is emphasized. Search results are then influenced by your network.

Another good one is WhosTalkin? This is a search tool that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest. Inquiries are performed against all sources but you can search on specific social services organized by blogs, news, networks, videos, images, forums, and tags.

Samepoint is a social conversation search engine that segments searches by social mentions, discussion points, booksmarks, wikis, networks, B2B networks, groups, life casting, micrblogs, reviews, podcasts, documents, video, images, news, and web. Each result extracts keywords, as well.

There are several other tools out there that you can search for to aid you in your social media search, but those are some good ones to start with and check out. These are great tools to find out where you stand, as well as your competitors.