Our list of free (mostly) and powerful real-time tools.
With real-time tools, you can immediately know the effects of new campaigns and media coverage. Whether you are monitoring conversations about your brand, or are looking for competitive advantages, here are a few of the ways you might use real-time tools:
- monitor whether new media coverage is being shared across your top outlets
- monitor the immediate effects of media coverage from a blog/social network post or tweet
- monitor conversations as you test key messaging from your brand
- understand usage of your brand, products and stakeholders through keyword tracking
- verify that your ad or TV spot ran
- see whether a one-day promotion is being shared, and which influencers are sharing your content
Our list of 10 Tools:
| Company Name | Link | Site Title | Description (Real-time) |
| Topsy | http://topsy.com/ | Search and Analyze the Social Web. | Search for social posts on Twitter and Google+ in real time and analyze domains, Twitter usernames or keywords. |
| Unbounce | http://unbounce.com/ | Build, Publish & A/B Test Landing Pages Without I.T. | Create and A/B test landing pages that collect real time data and alllow your customers to decide what’s best. |
| Google Analytics | http://www.google.com/analytics/ | Turn insights into action | Measure sales and conversions, track how visitors find your site, and create actionable insights, all in real-time. |
| MailChimp | http://mailchimp.com/ | Send Better Email | Implement email campaigns and track their performance and subscriber engagement immediately after they are sent. |
| Hootsuite | https://hootsuite.com/ | Get General about Social | Manage and monitor social media networks and collect real-time insights to gauge social sentiment around your brand. |
| TweetDeck | https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ | – | Schedule tweets, manage accounts, and monitor multiple timelines on Twitter in real-time. |
| Bitly | https://bitly.com/ | Unleash the power of the link | Shorten and brand your links, optimize link performance through Custom Bitlinks, and analyze your engaged audience through audience insight metrics. |
| IFTTT | https://ifttt.com/ | Connect the apps you love. | Aggregate web applications to create “recipes” of apps that can be linked together to trigger and perform actions. |
| Google Trends | https://www.google.com/trends/ | – | Ok not quite real time, but extremely useful. |
Our 10th (and favorite!) tool is of course Critical Mention, the most comprehensive Media and Social Media Monitoring (real-time) data set, allowing Clients to discover, share and analyze mentions across Broadcast TV and Radio, Online and Social Media with just a few keystrokes.
