What, you don’t pay attention to what people are saying about you, your brand or your business? Fail on you!
Time for some hacking, in this post I’ll give you a shortlist of tools to make up your own Social Media Monitor.
Real world example
Before we begin, I just want to point out one example where monitoring Social Media can be of extreme value. Microsoft Xbox Support, pays close attention to what people are saying about the Xbox 360 on Twitter.
So much that they have an entire support team monitor and respond to tweets from customers having problems. They hold a record, for answering 5,000 tweets in an average time of 2m 42s during a timespan of 6 days.
Twitter monitoring
Being able to monitor your brand on Twitter, first and foremost involves being able to control and monitor the content that you share on Twitter. That means you must pay attention to how you publish your tweets, and especially your links – both links to your own sites, and external sites. Two simple tools to use for publishing your tweets:
- A Twitter client
- A URL Shortener
#1 – Twitter client
There’s a ton of Twitter clients on the internet. Some of the more popular ones include:
All the above clients have the basic features you need.
#2 – A URL Shortener
Since the anatomy of a tweet, is that it can be maximum 140 characters long you face a few issues regarding links. Luckily URL shorteners exists, and good news is that all the Twitter clients listed above automatically shortens your URLs.
I recommend that you set your preferred client up to use bit.ly as the URL shortener – simply because you can take any bit.ly short URL, and append the plus character e.g. http://bit.ly/gLwf6D+ and you will see a page containing some nice statistics, such as clicks.
Monitor your tweets, retweets and clicks
Assuming that you share quality tweets including links, you can now use bit.ly to see statistics of your tweets and links. It will give you an idea of what your followers like.
What others are saying about you on Twitter
To monitor what others are saying about you on Twitter, you can use Twitter Search. Twitter Search is an effective way of seeing real-time data filtered by keywords (your brand name), location and more.
To use Twitter Search, go to http://search.twitter.com and type in your brand name. This will give you a list of tweets that include your brand name.
If you want a more sophisticated search, click the ‘Advanced search’ link and you’ll get a whole lot of possibilities for searching:
Useful search criteria include:
- Language
- Location
- Attitudes
#Powertip – Grab the RSS feed
The whole idea about monitoring, is that you don’t want to go around the internet and find information all the time. You want it delivered straight to your computer. The best way possible, is to grab the RSS feed of the search result. Put it into your favorite RSS reader, and you will now get any updated matching your search delivered as it happens.
#Powertip – Use Google Reader to see statistics
If you use Google Reader for RSS reading, you have a hidden but useful feature. After adding your Twitter search subscription, let a week pass by so that enough data has been gathered.
Go to Google Reader, and click the search subscription. See the little ‘Show details’ link at the top, right corner:
I find the Day of the week stats useful for deciding on when to send e-mail marketing campaigns.
Social Media Monitoring products
If you’re looking for a dedicated monitoring solution, there are quite a few products on the market:
See more tools, including reviews in Murray Newlands’ Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools and reviews blog post.
What search engines have to say about you
This is not directly social media, but the search engines do have a lot of data indexed and that includes tweets that are syndicated to loads of 3rd party sites like Topsy.
Google Alerts is a great way to monitor what people are saying about you on blogs. With Google Alerts you can set up alerts that are delivered straight to your inbox as soon as they index something that matches your search criteria.
#Powertip – Get an alert whenever someone links to your site/blog
If you want to know about new links pointing your way, use this as your search term in Google Alert: link:www.mydomain.com with mydomain.com being the address of your site. If someone blogs about you, or links to your site from elsewhere, you’ll know as soon as Google have their link indexed.