Michelle Krasniak - Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

The onslaught of data from social media sites can be overwhelming. To garner some value from all the noise, you can take advantage of certain tools to monitor what’s being said about your company.

When should you start to worry? Some experts suggest that a negative comment appearing within the first 20 results on a Google search on your name, brand, or product could be a sign of trouble. Don’t worry about a one-off negative comment on a minor site.

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.

Bring user feedback directly to you. Place a free feedback widget on your site from a provider like 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.

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

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.

If you’re not sure where to start, begin with weekly Google Alerts to monitor the web and the 14-day free trial for Mention’s daily alerts (free and plans start at $25/month) to monitor social media. Add one tool each for blogs and social media platforms you’re active on or the ones you think people may be on and talking about your business on their own. Adjust as needed. (More on both these tools in the next section.)

Choose one or more of the tools in the following sections to monitor across multiple types of social media.

Mark your choices on your Social Media Marketing Plan. If the tool doesn’t offer automated reporting, you’ll need to enter the submission task, as well as the review task, on your Social Media Activity Calendar.

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.

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 ( 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.

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.

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 that monitors your desired social media platforms; then tweak the applet to include the search terms you want to monitor.

Mention ( https://mention.com/en ) monitors multiple social networks, news sites, forums, blogs, and any web page in 43 languages. It offers several helpful features: one, the capability to export data, filtered by time and source, which allows you to compare your results to competitors’ results; and two, real-time alerts plus a daily or weekly digest by email. Its free basic plan allows one user, one alert, and up to 250 mentions per month but doesn’t include analytics. Paid versions — which have higher limits on the number of alerts, mentions, and users — start at $25 per month for 2 alerts, 3,000 mentions, and 1 user; all plans include a free 14-day trial.