Getting Started in Social Media Monitoring

Earlier this week I participated in a webinar hosted by Rick Burnes of Hubspot, Cambridge, MA-based provider of inbound marketing software. The webinar was featured on getting started in social media in as little as 10 minutes per day. It focused on one of the most important components to business growth strategies – measurement.

To start, you will want to set up a few different alerts to be able to track mentions about your company, brand, and products. Burnes suggested using Google Alerts, which allows you to input an infinite amount of keywords to monitor on a comprehensive basis as the news happens. To ensure your alerts pick everything up, you should choose a comprehensive alert as the news happens. This will pick up any mentions of your keywords on the Internet including social media sites like Twitter. Burnes also described searching for your company within Twitter itself and subscribing to the feeds to get a constant update. Hubspot’s Burnes highlighted the use of Google Reader to serve as the tool to streamline and organize all of your monitoring efforts so that your inbox does not get flooded with a bunch of email alerts. With Google Reader, you are able to subscribe to feeds and view them all within one viewer.

There are plenty of other free tools available that offer the same service as Google Alerts including Trackle and Collecta.

• Trackle offers two services: Trackle Basic and Trackle Premium.
  • Trackle Basic is much like Google Alerts. You can determine which keywords and media you want to track as well as the frequency. There are a number of different pre-determined topics you can search as well. You are able to receive email updates of your trackles or you can login to the system to avoid inbox clutter.
  • Trackle Premium is a paid service, but is available for a 30 day free trial. Although I have not tried it yet, it seems like a useful tool for businesses. Unlike Google, Trackle is able to track multiple different media including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, analyst reports, images, and more.
• Collecta allows you to do real time searches on your company. It searches blog posts, comments within blogs, Twitter, photos, and videos. It is a good tool to see an instant snapshot of your company or brand.

Remember this data is more valuable to your company than simply knowing what your customers are saying about you – albeit that is incredibly valuable. With the data, you can draw insights to help better your company’s competitive positioning and influence marketing and content marketing strategies because you will be more informed. For example, you will know where your competitors are playing and you will understand where and how your customers engage on the Internet.

How do you currently monitor your social media presence?