Page 51 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

paid tools and services, which are more appropriate when you’re planning a spe-
cific SMM campaign. In this section, we discuss some of the free tools:

» Blog search engines: These search engines crawl (sort through) just the
blogosphere for the terms that you input. They search for those terms in the
blog posts and the comments, and the searches generally include all publicly
viewable blogs on the Internet. If you just want to get a sense of the conversa-
tions in the blogosphere about a specific topic or brand, these search engines
can help you do that. The most popular one is Blog Search Engine (http://
www.blogsearchengine.org), which is shown in Figure 2-4.

FIGURE 2-4:
Blog Search
Engine.

A discussion on blog search engines wouldn’t be complete without mention-
ing the official Twitter search tool (http://search.twitter.com). Twitter is
the most popular microblogging platform. Microblogging is similar to blogging
except that you’re restricted to a certain number of characters per post. In
addition to the Twitter search functionality, several Twitter tools, such as
TweetDeck (shown in Figure 2-5) and Hootsuite, integrate search functionality.
» Buzz charting: Similar to the blog search engines are the buzz charting tools.
These tools focus on giving you a comparative perspective on how many
different keywords, phrases, or links are discussed in the blogosphere. They
search for the terms and then organize the responses into a chart, with the
x-axis being time and the y-axis the number of posts. The most popular of
these tools comes from Google and is called Google Trends (http://trends.
google.com), as shown in Figure 2-6.

CHAPTER 2 Discovering Your SMM Competitors 35