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.