Social media is  a great way to engage with your audience and monitoring what they are talking about.  Social media marketing has become essential for any business or website owner today.

However the distributed nature of social media can at times make it overwhelming to track and monitor conversations. Luckily, you can take advantage of social media submission tools as well tools to measure your social influence. In this article, we will discuss some of the best free tools to monitor conversations across multiple social networks.

There are many reasons to monitor conversations on social media. If you have an active social media strategy for your business, you need to listen to what your customers are talking about you.  Content publishers and marketers may wish to monitor trending topics.

Following are some reasons to track conversations on social media:

• Find out who is talking about your business, brand or website
• Discover who is talking about your competitors
• Research topics and trends related to your niche
• Discover who is sharing your content
• Engage with your audience

Even if you are new to social media,  finding topics relevant to your niche or finding those who are talking about these topics can help get your business started on social media.

Here are 5 Free Tools to track Social Media conversations:

1. PostRank

PostRank delivers objective, real-time data and analysis on any topic, trend, or interest relevant to you or your business. Recently been acquired by Google, PostRank claims to be the largest aggregator of social engagement data. It measures user activity on over 20 of the top social networks and is an accurate indicator of the influence of a site, story, or publisher.

You can measure your performance as well track conversations. Its activity streams show who is talking about your business, any other topic of interest or who is sharing your content. This allows you to engage and be more responsive with your audience.

2. Social Mention

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real time. SocialMention monitors 100+ social media properties directly, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, and so forth.

It’s straightforward and easy to use. You simply type the brand, product, service name or keywords/phrase into the search field, select where you would like to search the social sphere for the search term(s) you have entered and click the Search button. Based on your search criteria, SocialMention will return all of the mentions of your brand or keyword/phrase across the web.

3. Brand Monitor

The Brand Monitor Basic Edition is a free Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Platform has everything you need to get started with social media monitoring and engagement. Track your brand, your competition or search any topic across many social media sites. It is also great for tracking articles, blog posts and tweets in Near-Real-time.

Get a full report on conversation volumes, the top sites where conversations are occurring and the top keywords being discussed or compare conversation volumes and sentiment for your search topics.

4. Engag.io

Engag.io is like an inbox with analytics for all your social media conversations including blog comments. Engagio lets you track and reply to your comments from Facebook Comments (or Wall), Twitter conversations, Google+ posts, LinkedIn comments or shared links or Foursquare check-ins from a single Inbox.

It makes s Makes social conversations easier by offering the following benefits:

• Efficient tracking of conversations you have started
• No more lost conversations or ones you forget about
• Saves you time by focusing on replies first
• Get visibility about who is engaging with you
• Discover where your top contacts are commenting

5. Google Email Alert System

Google Alerts is a quick and easy way to monitor the Internet using any keyword, or search phrase. You can use it to be notified of any instance of those keywords and phrases or your brand, product or service. As soon as Google finds them online, it sends it straight to your inbox.

Conclusion:

According to Postrank, off-site engagement (Engagement on online sources other than your website) now accounts for 80% of the attention your content receives. This makes it even more important to monitor and tap into conversations taking place on social media about your company or sector and  learn how to improve and discover your audience. The free social media monitoring tools above can help you tap into the full benefits of social media by tracking conversations about your brand, content or topics relevant to your niche.