It’s important to know what are people saying about your brand online. When working with a client, I always make sure to ask “are you monitoring your brand or company name mentions?” But small businesses and website owners may not want to spend money on expensive monitoring services.
In this article, I cover some of the tools to use so that you can monitor what people are saying about your brand online. Some are free, and some have a cost. Depending on the size of your business, you will be able to make a better decision about which monitoring tool would be the best one for you.
If you are not monitoring, how will you know if your company is receiving good publicity? What are your clients and customers telling their friends on social media about your services or products? You need to know the answer to those questions. Monitoring your social presence across the internet is a crucial part of understanding what is going.
If you don’t know how to monitor mentions of your brand online, then you are definitely missing out on valuable feedback and opportunities. If you notice that people are singing your praises, then there are ways to take advantage of that.
On the other hand, if people are complaining about your products or criticizing your business, you will have found some valuable feedback that you can use to improve your products and mitigate any damage that would be detrimental to your company.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great free way to know when Google has found a webpage that has a mention of your brand. You will receive an email according to your settings when a specific keyword phrase gets mentioned. It doesn’t do a good job keeping track of social media, but it’s great for website mentions.
Add alerts for your such things as your brand name, website, CEO, phone number and keywords.
What’s great about this method is that if you do find a webpage that has included your business name in their content, you can visit the page to see if it includes a link back to your site and if it’s a no-follow. You can use the opportunity to contact the writer/ owner of that site to link properly to your site if necessary.
IFTT (If-This-Then-That)
IFTTT allows you to create hundreds of different triggers for free that happen as a result of an action from one of several apps. It isn’t specifically a brand alerting tool… but you can turn it into one using a ‘recipe’. You can create recipes for multiple alerts. For example,if you want to monitor for common misspellings of your brand’s name.
For example, with RSS and email channels, you can turn any RSS feed into your very own alerting tool. Alternatively, you could also have RSS feed items appended to a spreadsheet or even notify you on your phone when new items appear.
Talkwalker Alerts
Another free tool is Talkwalker Alerts. Talkwalker Alerts are an easy and free alerting service that provides email updates of the latest relevant mentions on the Web directly to your email box or RSS feed reader. It’s basically like Google Alerts… but much better for social media.
Talkwalker has a feature that allows you to benchmark your brand against industry peers, provide demographic data and create automated reports. It allows you to refine your search results with more than four dozen filters.
Other paid monitoring services have more coverage than Talkwalker, and will catch more mentions done on social media, but it’s a great free tool not to be ignored.
Social Mention
Social Mention is another free monitoring tool and makes it easy to search for brand mentions, keywords and hashtags across a variety of platforms, including blogs, new sites, uploaded videos, images and more. It can also provide you with helpful statistics about your brand’s mentions, including sentiment, top users and top hashtags used.
They also have a measure of your brand’s strength which look’s at how often it’s being discussed, the passion of the posting which is how likely someone will repeat the mention, the sentiment positive/negative, and the reach or measure of influence of those mentions.
The alert function was not active during the writing of this article however.
Twitter Advanced Search
Twitter advanced search provides a search option that can be used for brand, keyword and keyword phrase monitoring. What’s great about TweetDeck is that it also gives you a very simple way to not only monitor for your brand, but also to distribute information found and share it with others.
Using a social dashboard like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, will enable you to make this Twitter search much more powerful as you can pull these search results into your dashboard and add columns for real-time monitoring.
Hootsuite
While most people use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts, it can also be used to track brand mentions, Hootsuite is it’s own monitoring tool as well. Along with working with the Twitter Advanced Search, it also can monitor other social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Hootsuite is free for a basic account, and Pro accounts start at $9.99 per month. With the free account, you can add up to three social media profiles and two RSS feeds, and you can also schedule social media posts.
Monitoring Your Brand Mentions
Keeping on top of what people are saying about your company is truly important now in social media. The speed at which a brand’s reputation can be tanked by trending mentions can be alarming. Monitoring can also be used to find new opportunities as well to quickly take advantage of positive news before a trend peters out.
If you have any questions about setting up some of these monitoring services or have any other questions about monitoring your company’s brand online, feel free to contact me and I would be happy to help.
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