Social Mention is a free tool which is a kind of Google search for the social web. It provides basic search and alerts across a very broad variety of social channels.
Netvibes is suited for social media enthusiasts whom want to convert visits and click to sales. Bu utilizing the dashboard, you are armed with the capabilities to produce a higher amount of traffic to any website.
If you are curious about what someone is saying about your brand, this tool helps you to know how your brand is performing on all social media sites. Also seeing the previous results you can predict future performance. This data helps a lot in the future planning. This tool doesn't give perfect results though. Also, it can indicate your sentiments of mentions if they are angry, or happy.
I love that Social Mention is so easy to use. It does not take a long time to learn how to navigate the site when you need information quickly. I don't use it as much in my new job, but I recommend it for basic monitoring and when you need social media information right away
It doesn't work as well since we changed our name. We used to have a very unique twitter handle etc. so it was easier for social mention to find us. For folks who have unique names it's excellent if you don't it may not be that helpful.
While both (Netvibes and Paper.li) are content aggregators, they perform very different functions. Netvibes is extremely useful when you are trying to catch up on the news on the go, come up with more content ideas based on the current trends and use the trending articles in your content marketing.
Social Mention stacks up against these as Social Mention is more reliable for data than others. it provides really nice statistics of reach, influence, sentiment and helps find brand's influences. It is quick and offers a great snapshot of the volume of your Tweets & Twitter presence. Supports a lot of social media sites like Facebook, Google+ etc.
The paid-version actually had a negative ROI for us as it would sometimes feed us topically inappropriate articles and didn't allow us to filter by source so as to eliminate inappropriate blogs and inappropriate news sources (like highly politically partisan ones).
