Social Media tools are great for sharing your ideas, thoughts and company products but we tend to forget that ‘speaking’ will only truly work if we also ‘listen’. One of the most important and crucial aspects of ensuring that your social media efforts work is ‘listening’. Discovering what your customers are saying about you, what they like or dislike about your products/services is as significant as organizing your online presence, spreading your own ideas via blogs and setting up a Facebook business page to market your products. Companies spend thousands on a website, SEO and analytics but forget to listen out what people are saying about them but also about similar products and companies. By listening well you will be able to handle your online reputation properly and ensuring that YOUR viral buzz is positive.
5 Tools for Listening, Learning and Managing Your Online Reputation
1. Google Alerts
This is a great tool to use to ensure you are keeping track of any articles, news, or comments about your company, brand, products, or services. You can set up an automatic email alert to ensure that any content mentioning something about your business will send you an email with the content. There will be a slight delay in the alerting but hey it’s free.
2. Google Reader
This handy tool will store all your RSS feeds in one place. This type of listening tool is perhaps the most sophisticated as you are analyzing information from different blogs across the Web and learn from other experts. You also get a flavor for what people are talking about as well as trends in various areas.
3. Twilert
Another great tool specifically for keeping track of what users are saying about you on Twitter is twilert.com. This program will alert you whenever anyone discusses your company, brand, products, or services as well as whether the tone of the content was negative or positive.
4. HowSociable
This is an excellent little helper to track and protect your online brand reputation but also to give you an idea about how visible you are. It actually provides you with a score! This service is also going to be offering a Pro service soon which will allow you to receive detailed reports which can be exported to PDF, brand comparisons with your competitors and you can track your social media results with historical data.
5. Social Mention
Another fantastic and powerful tool for tracking your online brand reputation, seeing what users are saying about you and comparing your results. Social Mention allows you to receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, as well as news articles and blogs which are in your area of interest.
So as you can see, there are dozens of different online listening tools to learn about online trends, tap into expertise as well as playing Big Brother to protect your brand and reputation. These tools are also great for determining your return on investment for the time and money you invest into your social media marketing. By listening you can start organizing your online presence with an effective Social Media strategy.