Five Free Tools To Easily Monitor Social Media Updates
Instead
of treating social media outlets like a megaphone, we should manage
them like a telephone. It is important to have a more personalized
approach and know where to listen. More focused methods allow us to know
what people say about our brand and give us the opportunity to respond
immediately. Here are five free listening tools available for hardcore social media fans:
Google Alerts: This
is a good tool to find out whether someone is posting about us or not.
It does not cover all blogging sites or social media networks; but is
still a good automated tool for entry-level users. It is very useful
personally to deliver feedback on any search query and is effective
enough for businesses and marketing teams to utilize while running a
customer focused campaign.
Hootsuite: Here we have a very robust tool to help
us to easily manage and consolidate our social media accounts. There
are search columns to scan and “listen” on social networks for personal
or brand mentions. Included is the ability to post content straight to
our networks including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Foursquare
and others in real time. Not everyone will use tags or hashtags when
tweeting about us, so Hootsuite provides an accurate method for spotting
what’s being discussed at the moment.
Tweetdeck: Like Hootsuite this
tool arranges your Twitter account in a very neat and organized
columned layout. It gives you the ability to monitor your home feed,
@mentions, direct messages, favorites and so much more.
Unlike Hootsuite, Tweetdeck only gives the user the ability to monitor
and engage on Twitter.
Social Mention: This
is a tool that gathers aggregated data from multiple social media
platforms. We can search and discover results from YouTube, Photobucket,
Twitter, Facebook and others. It’s built-in analytics feature can
help determine whether people have positive or negative sentiments about
you or your brand. Another great feature of Social Mention is the easy
to integrate API that can be used to stream real time social data on
your project.
Topsy: This
site is roughly similar to Social Mention but with a much more updated
user interface as well as the option to view Social analytics and
Trends. Users do not need to register if they do not want to and it is
possible to create email alerts that are targeted by keywords of your
choice. Topsy can integrate with your Facebook or Twitter account and
can be utilized as a quick research tool.
Unfortunately,
none of these tools are comprehensive and they simply capture snapshots
of social activity. We will not get all social media and blog updates
by using only one of them. Fortunately, these tools are very easy to use
and it takes only a few minutes to perform a thorough scan. Using these
tools, it would be easy to make a habit of listening to and
searching social media updates.
But,
what we should search for? Average users can put their names or
nicknames in the automated alerts; while companies should add
business/organization name, brand name, names of key staff, names of
products and others. It is also a good idea to use misspellings or
alternate spellings. Using unique names is also important, because our
search results will not be contaminated by references to other people
with similar names. Businesses should choose keywords relevant to their
industry. It is a good idea to learn Boolean search syntax as this could
immensely enhance search performance. While it is not really necessary
to try all possible variations, we could focus on things we are
concerned about most. Businesses seeking to start a press campaign about
new marketing initiatives may also combine business names with key
phrases related to the marketing efforts.
Using
listening tools is not just for vanity. We could immediately jump
into blog posts, conversations, articles and others allowing us
to interact with people who share similar preferences or those who are
interested in our products. Of course, we shouldn’t be overly sensitive
if someone posts something negative or even inappropriate. We can take
this as constructive criticism or we can respond with humor.
Whatever the case, we should follow up and interact with our audience.
People love transparency and when we behave in this manner they are more
likely to pay attention. It is actually much easier to keep our house
clean if we work at it a little bit each day rather than cleaning it up
after a week of neglect. The same principle applies to our social
media marketing and these listening tools can help us to clean up each
day. We should set aside a little bit of time each day to check what
people are saying about us online and decide whether or not we should
make a response. Average users and small businesses don’t have to go for
dedicated commercial listening tools like Radian6 and many of the other
high budget options because available free tools are more than
enough. If we begin with the five tools mentioned above we will be well
on our way to successfully monitoring our Social Media efforts. Visit us for more tips about social media and dayton ohio seo. And let us know about your concern.
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