Social media search engines: find out what others are saying about you, your business, and your community.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 – 7:42 pm

As the social media world continues to grow, the task of keeping tabs on what others may be saying about you, your business, or your community becomes increasingly important.
But how to do this, you ask? When your standard search engine (think Google) doesn’t cover the content that could point you towards key conversations, you need to start digging a bit deeper. For example, if I wanted to know what is being said about the Spokane Public Library on social media sites it would require a lot of effort on my part to track down that type of information.

Or at least it was.

Now there are several social media search engines that do a fabulous job of keeping you informed and connected to individuals who might be talking about (or need) your product or service.

First up, whostalkin.com. From their web site: WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most. NOTE: Use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox to navigate this site. For some reason Firefox is insanely slow.

Next, Backtype.com. From their web site: BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you fill out the “Website” or “URL” field in a comment form when you publish a comment on a blog or other website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet. If you don’t have a website to use when you fill out comment forms, sign up and use one of ours.

These strike me as being two of the more useful social media search engines that I’ve found. If any of you use another site, I’d love to hear about it.