The growth in social media means it’s vital for all businesses to track their brands, services and industry via the myriad of user generated content sources.

Tracking social media is no easy feat. When you consider just how much content is created every hour, the task of following the various sources is extremely time consuming. To help you streamline the process, I’ve provided my top 10 social media tracking tools below.

And the best part is that they’re all FREE!

And here’s the list:

Google Alerts
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
http://www.google.com/alerts

Social Mention
Real-time social media search and analysis. Social media alerts, like Google Alerts but for social media. Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.
http://www.socialmention.com/

Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, and what’s now.
http://addictomatic.com/

Yacktrack
a social media monitor and conversation tracker. As a content producer, you can search for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content. Granted, this may sound like it is targeted at the content producer, but it can also help the people commenting on the content themselves.
http://yacktrack.com/search

Omgili
Omgili is your way to find “subjective information”. As opposed to traditional search engines, which search for sites and pages, Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
http://omgili.com/

Boardreader
A simple search engine that scans various forums, messageboards and now various other forms of social media. Filter searches by preferred sources and keep a breast of your forum mentions.
http://boardreader.com/

Samepoint
Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about.
Discover, learn and share new web sites and ideas.
http://www.samepoint.com/

HowSocialable?
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. Measure your brand against 32 key social metrics.
http://www.howsociable.com/

Surchur
surchur.com is the ultimate dashboard (the developers opinion) to right now. Built by a team that is passionate about what the real time web can offer, we’re constantly improving and updating our site.
http://surchur.com/

Blogpulse
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs.
http://www.blogpulse.com/

There are plenty of other tools out there to help you keep on top of social media’s content, but these ones work well as aggregators and will definitely help you streamline the tracking of your social media campaigns.

If you use another tool that you think’s worth sharing, post it via our comments below.

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