Businesses are always looking to improve their market intelligence. They want to know about the competition, trends in their industry, and what customers are saying. The problem is that there are so many tools available for this area of research that it can be hard to figure out which one will work best for you. To help with that decision, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most common market intelligence tools and how they can be integrated into your business operations.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts provide a free service that sends you an email when Google finds new content about a topic, person, organization, or place in over 60 different types of sources. By setting up alerts for your business and your competitors, you can discover what people are saying about them online. This information can be valuable to both large and small businesses. For example, if someone were to post a bad review on Yelp about one of your client’s businesses, you could let the client know so they could do something to fix the problem before it gets worse. The best thing about this tool is that it doesn’t require any additional software installation because it’s part of Google’s services. You have to set up an account and then set up alerts for your alerts.

2. Social Mention

Social Mention is another free tool you can use to look through the social media sphere and see what people are saying about a particular topic, person, company, or place. It searches through over 600 different content sources, including Twitter, blog posts, news sites and message boards to find any mentions of keywords you specify. You can then browse the results according to how many times the keyword was mentioned – either on its own or in combination with other words (e.g., “social media” OR “Twitter”). This tool is precious because it has an alerting function that will send you an email when new mentions of these key terms appear online. This way, you can set it up to send you alert whenever your company or a competitor has been mentioned on any major social media sites.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends shows what’s trending in different countries worldwide based on how many searches have been made about that topic over time. This is another excellent way to find out what people are interested in and which topics might be related to yours. You can also compare different trends to see how they’re related or use the map view to see what’s popular across different continents. It’s important to remember that something is trending doesn’t necessarily mean it will do well with your target audience. Still, at the same time, you can use this information to get a general idea of what people are interested in before doing any further research.

4. Netbasequid

Netbasequid is a unique way to search through Twitter, blogs, and message boards through social media data. It lets you use advanced queries to help you gather the market intelligence. This means that you can look for tweets, including hashtags and those containing particular words. In other words, this tool lets you get much targeted results about the opinions that people have on your company or industry without having to weed through all of the noise that other tools bring up because they just provide an overall popularity ranking for a term. Suppose you’re using other social media monitoring tools. In that case, it’s important to remember which ones bring up more general information and which ones are good at finding out what everyone thinks about something.

Conclusion

Google Alerts, Social Mention, Google Trends, Netbasequid, and other tools mentioned provide powerful ways to monitor your social media sphere as they equip you with the market intelligence you need to grow your business.