Whether or not you are active in social media, have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, you should be monitoring the Web for mentions of your company’s name. Virtually all news media is also published online, and people write reviews, blog posts, and comments about brands constantly. By monitoring your brand online, you can be aware of what people are saying about you (or your competitors).
What Should You Monitor?
The first step in monitoring your brand is determining what you want to monitor! It’s a lot like keyword research. There are several areas you may want to consider tracking, including:
- your company name
- key employees’ names
- trademarks you own
- competitor names
- key search engine phrases (phrases you want to rank well for in search engines, such as your product names, web site name, company name, and so on)
Ultimately, what you monitor is up to you. Once you have chosen some key phrases that you want to monitor, you’ll be able to set them up below.
Google Alerts
If you only use one service to monitor your brand online, it should be Google Alerts. Alerts is a free and incredibly easy way to keep track of what key phrases are appearing in search results in Google’s index. Since Google reaches over 80% of Internet users, Google Alerts is the place to start.
Using Google Alerts is incredibly simple… there are just a few fields to enter:
- Search terms
These are the phrases that you chose above. You need a google alert for each of them, or you can use Google’s shorthand and put phrases in quotation marks with “OR” between them. - Type
- Everything
- News
- Blogs
- Updates
- Video
- Discussions
- How often
- Once a day
- Once a week
- Email length
- Up to 20 results
- Up to 5o results
- Your Email
For the typical search you can simply enter your search keywords and email address, and leave everything else to default settings.
Twitter Search
Twitter Search is a really effective way to see what people are saying about your company (or your competitors) on Twitter. You can search for a word or phrase, or a Twitter username, and see recent mentions.
With the advanced search, you can also exclude word or phrases, search for hashtags, specific languages, or tweets that reference a specific user or are from or to a specific user. Twitter’s advanced search can also search retweets and tweets with links.
You can subscribe to Twitter’s search results using RSS, which we’ll discuss in more detail below.
Twitter Lists
You might want to keep up with your competition, industry leaders, or industry associations on Twitter, but don’t want to follow them and see all their updates in your regular feed.
Twitter lists let you create groups of users. Lists can be marked private, so the users you follow don’t have to know you’re following them.
RSS
What is RSS?
Several years ago when you wanted to keep up to date with a website’s content, you had to visit the website frequently. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology that allows you to subscribe to a website’s content updates.
Similar to an email application, RSS readers allow you to consolidate all your feeds in one place. You can simply open one application or website to view all the updates from the websites you subscribe to.
Google Reader
Google Reader is a free online RSS aggregator. There are also numerous free and paid RSS readers available for every platform and operating system.
How to Monitor Your Brand Using RSS
Many websites have a search function that can be subscribed to via RSS. You can search for your company name or other key phrases, and save the search to your RSS reader and get updates anytime that phrase appears on their website.
Below are several websites that are useful to search for your key phrases and subscribe by RSS:
Backtype
Enter your website’s URL (web address) and BackType will show you who’s been linking to your site on Twitter. It shows a graph with the number of mentions over the past week, a list of top influencers who have shared the address in the past month, and a list of latest tweets mentioning the URL.
You can also compare your website to a competitors’ URL (or compare two competitors).
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hey Brandon-
Great post for people getting started in monitoring.
As a social-media monitoring provider, we also help clients develop and tweak keyword lists… so as a tip, I would add that the initial list of keywords to track should be short and simple.
People should keep in mind that these are literal searches, so tracking common names or broad industry terms should be avoided if at all possible. Garbage in = garbage out.
Since there is so much information in social media (that may not all be relevant), starting with a few basic searches should help narrow the focus.
Jason Arican
Meltwater Buzz