Guest Post by Lauren Horn from ProspectMX |
The most obvious reasons businesses are involved in social media outlets are to reap the benefits from increased customer loyalty and brand engagement. Social media surrounds us, consumes us and engages us. From fans to followers, brands everywhere are actively working to capture their current and future customer base through the web and social media.
Investing in social media monitoring helps companies from a branding and marketing standpoint. Where it would have been difficult to monitor conversations online about a brand in the past, today there are tools online that can help businesses identify quality control issues and customer service lapses that end up online that may have never been resolved. Online reputation is quickly growing in importance on the web, and social media tools can also help assist in that area as well. Social media monitoring helps brands discover who is saying what online and where the conversations are happening so they can respond in a timely fashion.
But, even though the tools are out there, many companies don’t know what the best tools are to use (or where to get them). There are several social media monitoring sites and tools that allow you track mentions of your company in real-time. Eight of the best ones are listed below:
Google Alerts
As the number one search engine, it’s no wonder that Google allows you to set up Google Alerts to any keyword searches you want. Alerts can contain your business name, competitors names, or keywords you want to rank for, while receiving updates to your email inbox or via an RSS feed. Google also allows you to select how often you would like to receive the alert and what you prefer the email length to be.
Social Mention
This monitoring tool allows you to take your query and focus strictly on blogs, blog comments, videos, photographs, mainstream news, and feeds from Twitter and Facebook. Social Mention allows you to find information you may not receive by performing a general query on search engines or by waiting for Google to send you an alert. Social Mention provides user friendly metrics such as reach, sentiment, passion, and strength too. Searches can be saved as an RSS feed, and notifications can be set up, too. For those companies that are well branded, Social Mention also has a real-time buzz alert widget for getting access to a stream of mentions.
Twitter Advanced
Twitter offers advanced features allowing users to create specialized searches based on particular criteria including keywords, people, places, dates, attitudes and others. In setting up the search, you can save results as an RSS feed to keep track of the latest mentions.
Addict-O-matic
This outlet allows you to create searches to retrieve the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. This tool pulls information into a consolidated page with matches streaming across blogs, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Digg, Flickr and more for summarizing the entire “buzz” on a brand in one location.
Spezify
Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of websites, mixing
all media types together, from tweets to blogs to images to videos. This site really permits you to view the BIG picture.
Google Reader
Set up RSS feeds for particular keyword searches to save into your Readers so that you have one hub location for all of this conversation and file sharing on all these websites. Google Reader allows you to check out sites like Flickr, Digg and Delicious from one centralized location. It’s also affiliated with your search engine, so if you feel the need to do additional searches, you’re already there.
HootSuite
A popular social media communication tool used to manage multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and LinkedIn can be used as a monitoring tool, too. You’re able to receive updates to one or more profiles at a time while being able to track click-throughs. If you use HootSuite as a communication vehicle, too, you can schedule updates while also monitoring brand buzz.
TweetDeck
Another account management tool like HootSuite is TweetDeck. The biggest difference with TweetDeck is that it is a desktop application, not a web-based application. This nifty tool is can also help in managing social media profiles via iPhone and/or iPad. The tool helps you manage profiles across various social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare and Google Buzz.
Lauren Horn is a digital PR specialist at ProspectMX, an internet marketing company in Pennsylvania that provides social media consulting services in addition to other web marketing campaigns like SEO and PPC.