Social media monitoring is about who’s saying what. It’s about your brand, your products, and your reputation. It’s not the same as social media measurement, which deals with traffic statistics, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI). Measurement is covered in Book 9, including chapters about measurement tools specific to particular social networks.
http://shoutbox.widget.me. This feature takes some programming knowledge; if you’re not up to the task, ask your programmer. You can find some monitoring tools for specific types of services in the sections that follow.
Deciding what to monitor and why
If you didn’t have anything else to do, you could monitor everything. That situation isn’t realistic, so you need to set some constraints. Start with your goal and ask yourself what you want to accomplish. For example, you may want to
Track what’s being said about your company and products, both positive and negative.
Conduct competitor or market research.
Stay up to date on what’s happening in your industry.
Watch trends in terms of mentions, topics of interest, or volume of comments.
Gain a competitive advantage.
Monitor the success of a specific press release, media campaign, or product promotion.
Monitor infringement of trademark or other intellectual property.
Obtain customer feedback so you can improve your products and services.
After you decide on your goal, it should be obvious what search terms or keywords to monitor. Your list might include
Your company name
Your domain name
Names of executives and staff who speak with the public
Product names and URLs
Competitors’ names
Keywords
Topic tags
Deciding which tools to use
The number of monitoring tools is almost as great as the amount of data they sift through. Research your options and choose at least one tool that monitors across multiple types of social media. Depending on the social media services you’re using, you might want to select one from each appropriate service category, as well.
The frequency with which you check results from these tools will depend on the overall visibility of your company, the schedule for your submissions to different services, and the overall intensity of your social media presence. For some companies, it might be a daily task. For others, once weekly or even once per month will be enough.
Using free or inexpensive social monitoring tools
Choose one or more of the tools in the following sections to monitor across multiple types of social media.
Brand 24
An affordable brand-monitoring tool, Brand 24 (http://brand24.net) starts at $49 per month, with a 14-day free trial. It includes both sentiment and data analysis to provide a good sense of the buzz around your product, brand, business, or search term. It covers multiple social media outlets, including Facebook and Instagram, with alerts daily or more often. Additional features available with more expensive plans allow you to review customer behavior, actions, and posts.
Google Alerts
One of the easiest and most popular of the free monitoring services, Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) are notifications of new results on up to 1,000 search terms. Alerts can be delivered via email or RSS feed. You can receive results for news articles, websites, blogs, video, and Google books and forums.
You set the frequency with which Google checks for results and other features from your My Alerts dashboard page. Think of Alerts as an online version of a clipping service.
Google Trends
Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) is a useful market research tool. It not only provides data on the hottest current searches, but also compares the number of searches on the terms you enter to the total number of searches on Google overall during the same time frame.
Click the menu icon (three bars) to the left of the word Trends in the header and select the Explore option in the drop-down list. Type the search phrase that interests you in the Add a Search Term field. From Explore, you can choose to refine your research by selecting options from the drop-down lists under Worldwide (location), Past 12 months (time frame), All Categories (topic area), and Web Search (content type.)
Select the Subscriptions option in the drop-down list to receive email notification of trending searches and stories.
HowSociable
Type any brand name at www.howsociable.com, shown in Figure 1-5, to see how visible it is in social media. The free version checks “one brand with 12 different metrics and limited features.” The paid upgrade checks 24 more channels. Click any element for additional details.
FIGURE 1-5: HowSociable provides a social-ranking score based on its definition of popularity.
IFTTT (If This Then That)
If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an automation tool that lets you write a script (called an applet) to receive notifications and accomplish other tasks online. You can easily use IFTTT to manage your online reputation. It’s easiest to browse existing public applets to find one