Monitoring brand mentions on Facebook has been said to be difficult due to its users’ choice for privacy, try to consider limited historical data available.  These tools cant really solve this obstacle, but it will still help you keep track of what other people are saying about you, your products or your business on  Facebook. You will be able to look through a small-scale snapshot of users and pages that have less restrictive privacy settings on them.

1.  Facebook

Facebook has 300+ million members and chances are high that some of them are talking about you or your product in their status updates and wall posts.

One very straight-forward way of finding out how frequent people posts anything about your brand or company in real time.

How it works: All you have to do is sign in to the site, search for your brand name or company into the search bar and hit on the enter button, you’ll be able to see posts from all pages on Facebook.

2.  48ers.com

This is a real-time social search that can help you monitor your brand more effectively, because it allows you to monitor your name, username and even links on various social media sites like Facebook with out having to log-in to the site. Best of all, you can monitor all of those items with a simple query in the search bar.

Its homepage is very simple, similar to that of Google search and Twitter search.  Another plus is that it works well on any device, it also provides a link back to the original post.

3.  SocialMention.com

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

How it works: It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time by receiving daily social media alerts.

Here you can opt to receive social media alerts which is the best feature.  It also has Sentiments which indicates if mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.  You can then filter the results to show just exactly what you want to see.

4.  Trackur

Trackur, a bootstrapped startup founded by Internet marketing consultant and writer Andy Beal, up until now offered only paid versions of its online reputation management and social media monitoring tools, albeit with free trial periods. It scans hundreds of millions of web pages-including news, blogs, video, images and forums.  It alerts the user to anything that matches the keywords monitored.

How it works: Now this one is like Social Mention where in you can just enter a single search phrase and return results from facebook. You can save a search (although for a free version you can only save one), meaning Trackur will automatically run it every 30 minutes and notify you of new mentions.

5.  Alterian SM2

Alterian SM2 is a social media monitoring and analysis solution designed for PR and Marketing professionals.

How it works: Alterian SM2 helps you track conversations, review positive/negative sentiment for your brand, clients, competitors and partners across social media channels, like Facebook.

Although the free version is quite limited to only 5 searches and 1000 results, the good thing is that these results are cached until you decide to delete them. If used on Facebook, the results may fill up very fast.  This is a good tool for SME’s, when ever the 1000 results doesn’t seem sufficient anymore you can always avail of a subscription which will let you have an unlimited search terms, 10000 and more total results and more.

The Northern Office – innovative marketing support offers an array of services like Online Marketing, Social Media, and Content Development, etc.  Need help monitoring your products online? click here.