I wanted to write about a few free simple to use but extremely valuable social media/online monitoring tools. Now this is far from an extensive list but these are some of the tools that I really find valuable and wanted to share with you. I’m sure many of you are going to have your own tools that you use or recommend and I’d love to hear about them so please share them in the comments below. Let’s get into it.
Twitter Search
Many of you are familiar with twitter and I hope you are familiar with twitter search. Twitter search is a search engine for twitter and it’s an extremely valuable twitter monitoring tool. You can see what people are saying about you or a particular topic or you can type in something like “marketing help/marketing jobs” to look for possible jobs or prospective clients. Twitter search is a great way to find out what people on twitter are talking about.
Google Alerts
I wrote about google alerts a little ago when I discussed how you can monitor your brand online for free. Using Google Alerts you can receive notifications via email that let you know every time someone mentions a particular keyword(s) that you select. You can create several alerts for things such as your company name, your product name, your name, etc. Let’s say you work for Dell, you can create a Dell alert that will send you a list of every site that has mentioned the word “Dell” that day. This is also great for competitive intelligence since you can use these alerts for any term (s). You can also set up alerts for terms such as “Dell Sucks” to monitor negative comments about you or your brand.
Serph
Serph is a very valuable tool that tracks keywords or phrases in real time. Serph doesn’t just look at search results it looks at all the available online information out there and it does so in real time. If you want to get a good snapshot for a particular keyterm or phrase then Serph is the way to do it.
Google Queries
Google queries are an absolutely outstanding way to find out what the overall impression is about you or your company online. You can start off simple by first making sure your site even appears in search results. Then you can get a little sneaky and try queries such as “my brand sucks,” “I love my brand,” “my brand is horrible,” etc. Of course you can also use Google Alerts to consistently monitor your terms or phrase. Google queries also allow for an excellent way to do online competitive intelligence.
UPDATED: Google Analytics
I’m not quite sure how I forgot to mention this but thanks to KDPaine for reminding me. Google Analytics is a very important and useful tool that everyone should have installed on their sites, and yes it’s free. G.A. will tell you what your traffic is, where it’s coming from, who your visitors are, how your visitors found your site, who is referring them, how long people are staying on your site, etc. Understanding your visitors is absolutely crucial and G.A. is probably the best tool out there to do so.
These are just a few of my favorite tools to use for online brand monitoring and of course they are all free. There are other tools out there such as google blog search, icerocket, etc. that you can also use for online brand monitoring.
What are some of your favorite online brand monitoring tools and why?
Thanks for reading
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