As
important as social media is for your business, once you have built all of your
social media profiles and are engaging other people online regularly, it is
equally important to monitor the effectiveness of social media for your
business.
In this age of sophisticated
technology, even if you don’t have a desire to be involved with social media
for your business, you really don’t have a choice. You have to keep up with
your customers and your competition. If you don’t get involved, you will be
giving up your edge and other business people will shine in the eyes of
potential and current customers and you will be left behind.
It is extraordinarily important to
have an effective and assertive social media marketing campaign in which your
branding is solid and your business offerings are highlighted and appear
compelling and attractive. Monitoring the results of your social media
marketing campaign is equally important. You need to keep your finger on the
pulse and have as much control as possible over the flow of your business
success so that it will be extremely easy to identify what is working and what
is not working.
In addition to monitoring the results
of your social media efforts, it is also important to have a good understanding
of who is saying what about you and your business and exactly where those
people are saying what they are saying. It is important because you will want
to respond to them as soon as you read what they have written.
The following are some of the most
effective social media monitoring tools that are being used today.
§ Google Alerts : This is an extremely popular and effective social
media monitoring tool. Google Alerts allows you to create keyword searches for
the name of your business or the names of your competitors. You will then
receive the results of your searches in your inbox or through your RSS feeds.If you combine Google Alerts with iGoogle (Google’s
portal), you can build a concise page that will contain the most current
results for the keywords that you have chosen. You should definitely consider
using Google Alerts. It doesn’t cost any money and it is very easy to set up.
§ Twitter Advanced Search : When you use the advanced feature of Twitter’s
search tool, you can generate very powerful searches. Once your search has been
set up, you can save the search terms as an RSS feed so that the information that
you are receiving is always current.
§ HootSuite : You
can manage multiple social media accounts across LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter,
Facebook, WordPress and MySpace. Even though HootSuite is actually an account management
tool, it has a very large user base and has powerful functionality. When you
have updates, you can add them to more than one social media profile at a time,
click through, automate updates and monitor your buzz.
§ Twazzup : This
tool focuses on Twitter. It puts everything on one page. Among its features are
influencers, top links and sentiment.
§ TweetDeck : This
is available for Mac, iPad, iPhone, Linux and Windows. TweetDeck is a good tool
to manage your social media profiles across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace, Foursquare, and Google Buzz.
§ Social mention : This
is a combination of metrics that are simple to read (including reach,
sentiment, strength (volume and day), and passion). Social mention will track
Twitter, blogs and blog comments, news, images, audio and video. You can save
your searches as an RSS feed so that you can continue to have current
information.
§ Icerocket : Icerocket
allows you to watch over Twitter, blogs, news, the web, images, and many other
things. Some of the features are a listing of mentions and a topic cloud.
Icerocket also gives you the ability to bookmark your search results and allows
you to return to them later.
§ Addict-o-matic : This is a consolidated page that matches searches
in Twitter, Digg, Flickr, blogs, and more. Addict-o-matic has a one-page
dashboard, is free of charge, and does an amazing job of placing all of your
“buzz” in the same place.
§ Boardtracker : This
works by grabbing buzz from forums and message boards. A list of some of
Boardtracker’s features includes an influencer list and a topic cloud. A
slightly negative feature is that there are advertisements mixed in with your
search results. However, you can purchase a premium version that will not have
the advertisements as part of the search results. This is a really handy tool
if your customers are more active on forums and message boards than any other
type of social media.
§ Seesmic : This
is similar to HootSuite. The two tools have the capability to manage many
accounts at once in common across many of the social media channels.
Conclusion
Social media monitoring tools and the
metrics that they bring to you are extremely important to the success of your
social media marketing campaign as well as the ultimate success of your
business. If you don’t pay attention to how your business is doing, you are
really only doing half of the job. It is the difference between walking around
in the dark and having an illuminated path that allows you to have an
understanding and an awareness of how your business is doing and how you can
continually make improvements that will bring you more and more exposure and a
rock-solid reputation.
Many companies are using social media
monitoring to strengthen their businesses. Those business people are savvy
enough to realize the importance of social media, how it positively influences
their businesses and how critical the monitoring piece of the strategy is to
their ultimate success.
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