I thought I told you not to click here you rascal! But seeing as you have, check out our most popular content and while you are at it, subscribe to our newsletter.
| Most read articles | Blog Categories | Get our Newsletter | Follow our updates |
| Branding Social Media Copywriting Personal Branding Video Tech |
|
This time three years ago we didn't have many options available to us in this area but of late there has been a massive explosion in new companies and services offering all kinds of tools that essentially do the same thing. Phew that was a long sentence. Ernest would rap my knuckles for that.
The whole idea of social media monitoring is to monitor mentions of your name, your company name, your product names, your keywords and your competitors' mentions. It shouldn't be used as a vanity tool to see how popular you are. Use the likes of Klout for that. There really is little point in investing time and money in digital marketing unless you are going to monitor it properly but sometimes monitoring properly can be hugely expensive. Take a look at Gatorade's setup in the video below.
Dim lights
How cool would it be to have that setup?
If you aren't huge you don't really need a huge budget so look past the likes of Attensity 360, Brandwatch,Radian6, Alterian, Scoutlabs, Sysomos,Synthesio, Social Radar and PeerIndex for now and forget about establishing a Gatorade 'Mission Control'.
In true Blue Peter style I'm am going to tell you how to do it for free with some lollipop sticks and a couple of bits of sticky-back plastic. Yes you love me, I know.
There are several ways to do this but for the purposes of simplicity we are going to use netvibes - so go there and set up an account. You can do this really quickly using the Facebook connect button.
Now that that's done let's hop over to twitter search and search for your desired keywords or company name. When that search is done you will notice a small RSS feed button on the top right. Click that and copy the web address for your feed.
Hop back onto netvibes and on the top left there's a little green button 'Add New" - click that and a dropdown will appear. Select RSS feed and paste in your twitter search feed. Then click 'add feed' and a little widget will appear below. Click the add button on the widget. Bosh. One feed done. Repeat this for all your keywords and your competitor names.
Now you want to create alerts in your new dashboard for other mentions. Below is a list of places to create feeds from. It's by no means exhaustive so check out the places you think people may be talking about you and try to create a search feed.
In case you want some more here is a long list of social media monitoring tools
The process should take you about an hour. Maybe the best hour you'll ever spend. Hope not.
Let me know what works for you.
blog comments powered by Disqus
