Social Media Monitoring Made Easy (Sort of)

July 22nd, 2010 by Brian Posnanski

There is a boatload of social media advice out there. It helps to remember that the first step is always to listen. Anything you do in social media should arise from how people are talking about your company, your market, your industry and the topics that matter most to your business.

We know, we know… ”How the heck am I supposed to monitor when there are dozens of major and HUNDREDS of minor social networks out there?!”

Don’t sweat it. You’ll never be able to monitor all of them, but with some basic diligence, you can usually find the content that matter most. In the interest of conversation we wanted to share a few of the ways that Traffic maintains social media listening posts for clients.

• Google Alerts. Don’t underestimate the power of the good old Google Alert. Google continues to innovate and expand their reporting reach. In fact, they recently started separating out results in the Google Alert emails, so you can see what comes from websites, from blogs and from news. We’ve found some important reviews and forum comments for clients by staying on top of alerts.
• Tap into Twitter. Just like any “industry,” social media has its own Big Three: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook is huge and will certainly develop better monitoring tools, but for now, Twitter is king when it comes to keeping track of overall buzz and sentiment about your company. Of course, you’ll need a Twitter client such as CoTweet, TweetDeck or HootSuite, which is our preferred tool. HootSuite not only lets you keep running track of who’s saying what about your company, but also lets you set up searches for keywords and competitors. You can separate everything into columns for easy reading.
• Set up RSS Feeds and Use an RSS Reader. One thing you should definitely do is identify and follow all of the blogs relevant to your industry. There are probably quite a few, so the best thing to do is aggregate all of those blogs via RSS. For those of you not familiar with RSS, it simply gives you a brief index of the latest headlines and stories from any given outlet. RSS is great because you can track all of those blogs from a single screen. (Note: there are a variety of ways to track RSS feeds… you can even do it in Outlook.)
• Invest in a social media monitoring platform – or have your agency do it. This is further down on the list for a reason. It’s an investment of time and money, but if you’re serious about social media, you’ll eventually want to do it. The list of social media dashboards and systems continues to grow. Zach Hofer-Shall over at Forrester just published a new Forrester Wave Report on Listening Platforms, which doesn’t even include so-called Social CRM platforms. Some of the more popular ones are Radian6 and Visible Technologies. We use Vocus, which just expanded the type and depth of the social networks it monitors. We get a daily report on each client. (We’re told by our account rep that Vocus should soon start monitoring Yelp – can’t wait!)

There are certainly other ways to monitor – and we welcome your suggestions – but we find the tools and tactics above do a nice job of capturing the stuff we should know. If you are a services-based business, you may want to consider starting a business account with some of the ratings sites like Yelp and Angie’s List – doing so can make it easier to respond to compaints and (yes) even advertise. Keep in mind also that even the best and most expensive social monitoring tools don’t always pick up chatter in forum and bulletin boards. You should find a way to keep manual track of those.

Tags: Forrester, HootSuite, social media, social media monitoring, vocus