Do you know who is talking about your brand? Monitoring social media is becoming increasingly important for public relations. You can respond to both negative and positive feedback about your brand instantly and manage your online buzz.
In the online world today, with new social media popping up constantly – how do you keep track of all of those mentions of your products, company or brand?
Of course you can purchase a service like Radian6, Trackur, or others that monitor your brand through keywords across the social media world and feed the information to you. The main benefit to using these services of course is that your time to manage all the social media activity is greatly reduced.
But, if you want to try managing the major social media sites on your own and want to get a sense of the content being posted out there on your brand? Here is a quick list of free tools to help you keep track of some of the top social media sources.
For the popular search engines provide tools to keep track of news items posted about your brand, although these can be somewhat limited:
Google gives you Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en)
Or, select the Google blog search or news RSS feed for more info.
Yahoo provides alerts for news and a whole host of other information, but you can select the “keyword news” to keep track of information related to your brand: http://alerts.yahoo.com/
Of course MSN provides a similar service as well: http://alerts.live.com/Alerts/UserHome.aspx
Of course other social media sites also provide monitoring tools:
http://search.twitter.com/ (Twitter’s own search engine)
http://tweetbeep.com/ (Send’s you Twitter Alerts in your email)
Facebook has a service called Facebook Lexicon, but you have to be logged on to use it – enter a keyword and find out what is being said about your company!
And More! You can subscribe to RSS feeds from other top social media sites, such as:
Other free tools:
Of course you can use free tools the pull from multiple social mediums, here are a few for you to check out, but keep in mind that these are typically not comprehensive and provide only a quick or limited view on the social media out there!
- Socialmention - allows you to select a specific form of social media, whether on blogs, bookmarking sites, etc.
- Moreover – this is an RSS feed that you can set up to send you information on a specific search term or category from 30,000 new sources.
There are plenty more, but hopefully some of these resources will help you keep on top of what your customers, competitors and even employees or vendors may be saying about your brand!
If you want to share your favorite social media monitoring tools or just want to discuss the impact of social media on branding, send me a comment or ping me!
Posted by Christina on March 31st, 2009
Filed under Branding, Media, Web | No Comments »
