Ten Social Listening Tools to Track your Brand

Ten Social Listening Tools to Track your BrandTen Social Listening Tools to Track your BrandTen Social Listening Tools to Track your Brand M. Rand, President and CEO of Zocalo GroupThese free tools can help you sort through the clutter and master the art of social listening as you evolve into a highly recommendable social business. Google Alerts. Google Alerts are so effective, so simple, and so helpful Im surprised they are still free. Simply type in a search term, like your company name, your CEOs name, or a product name, include what sites Google Alerts should look at - like only in blogs, in the news or media, or in graphics or videos - and also include how frequently - like daily or weekly - and Google will deliver the information right to your e-mail address. Twitter Search. Twitter Search is a great means of hands-on data gathering because the results you get are real time and real special and they arent sugarcoated. Simply use thesearch box and type in a term and landsee what comes up. You may, or may not, be surprised at what you find.IceRocket. When it comes to social listening, few sources are as rich and bursting with discussion as blogs. IceRocket lets you search not only blogs but also Twitter, Facebook, images, and more to find the latest on whos talking about you and where.Compete.com. Your free Compete.com analytics account allows you to see traffic data for over 1 million websites, discover related sites and competitors, and get monthly updates on your site and more.Technorati. One of the, if not the first search engines devoted to blogs, Technorati tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but it is also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the Blogosphere.HootSuite. HootSuite is a great free tool for measuring not just your reach but also a whole lot more. According to the companys website, With HootSuites integrated, custom social analytics, youll be able to measure your campaign perfor mance to help improve your social media communications. Yahoo Small geschftliches miteinander Advisor. Helpful for knowing and growing, Yahoo Small Business Advisor offers a variety of resources like articles, trend watches, columns, and more. In addition, it offers website hosting and a marketing analytics dashboard. BrandMonitor. When it comes to social listening, monitoring is the name of the game. Simply checking in with Facebook and Twitter every now and again isnt good enough. BrandMonitor helps you monitor both your social media reputation as well as that of your competitors, which, as we all know by now, can be just as important. Basic (and free) tools include a social media dashboard, brand sentiment analysis, and daily and weekly e-mail alerts so you can set it and forget it. SocialMention. SocialMention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure in real time what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the webs social media landscape. SocialMention monitors over 100 social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, and Google. SimplyMeasured. This website has quite a few free reports to download as well.How to Listen to your Company Brand Whats important to remember in the rush - even crush - of tools, data and analytics offered is that nothing can take the place of good old-fashioned observation. What the free tools below do is help gather information. Your kollektiv needs to actually sift through that info to find the real insights.Not all of it, of course. What we typically do at Zocalo Groupon any given campaign is sift through a statistically significant hand sampling of the data thats coming in.Whats critical to understand about social listening and a companys or brands ultimate reach in real conversations that are taking place both online and off is how social mediaresults Twitter, Facebook, blog and forum mentions are turning up as search engine results.What were learning through online word-of-mouth (WOM) analysis is how thoroughly social media is blanketing how others hear and find out about you, what they hear and find out about you as well as where.Keyword monitoring becomes critical in behauptung online discussions because those keywordsthat are actually being used by consumers about consumer brands wind up rising to the top of the search engine results.Through careful monitoring and measurement, brands can master these keywords and use them to drive online discussions, rather than merely follow them.Which, of course, is what knowing is all about.Excerpted with permission from Highly Recommendedby Paul Rand, reprinted with permission from McGraw-Hill. Copyright 2013Author BioPaul M. Rand is author of Highly Recommended(McGraw-Hill, 2013) and the founder, president and CEO of Zocalo Group,one of the worlds leading digital, social media and word of mouth marketing agencies and one of the fastest growing companies inside Omnicom Group. He served as president of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and is on the board of the national Council of Better Business Bureaus and vice chairman of the Deans Advisory Board for DePaul Universitys Driehaus College of Business and Kellstadt Graduate School of Business.