Are you Listening?
There are many tools for monitoring social media and blog posts. Some are free and some are subscription services. The more you rely on social media for your messaging, the more important it is to keep tabs on your audience's comments.
Frankonia Sculpture Park, MN ©Totsie Marine
by Totsie Marine
Webonobo.com
Some free tools include:
- Google Alerts where you plug in keywords (your business name, words related to your industry, your name, etc.) and Google will send you alerts and links to when that word is used in blogs, Facebook or other social media. Obviously, using very specific keywords is going to yield the more useful feedback.
- Facebook has its own set of tools where you can differentiate between 'likes', comments on posts you've made and 'shares' which show you when someone shares a link with a friend.
- Twitter fans have platforms like Hoot Suite and Tweet Deck for basic metrics.
- Blogs that use Google's Feedburner (as Blogonobo does) have a set of analytics available to track the unique number of people who view or click your feed.
Some subscription services include: Social Mention, Nutshell Mail, Kurrently, Rowfeeder and Addict-o-matic.
For more active users, monitoring dashboards lets you see a compilation of metrics all in one place and there are channel-specific tools if you focus all of your marketing efforts in one form of social media.
However you approach it, listening to your customers can enhance your product offerings and provide valuable public relations feedback on your activities.
