- Starting the Conversation
- Becoming Part of the Community
- Responding to Comments
- Monitoring Other Conversations
Monitoring Other Conversations
Naturally, you need to be proactive about taking part in social media conversations related to your own Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. But there may still be lots of conversations about you that you're not taking part in because you're not aware of them.
You see, conversations don't always take place in expected places. A disgruntled customer can tweet or post a Facebook status update that will be read by hundreds of his friendsand hundreds more of their friends, if they forward it along. Perhaps customers are talking about you in forums you're not even aware of. You might want to respond, but you can't if you don't know what's being said and where.
To that end, it pays to monitor the social media for conversations involving your company and products. This way you can be notified if your name is taken in vain (or justly praised), you have the opportunity to respond, and you're made aware of other groups and forums in which you should be participating on a more regular basis.
Short of monitoring every possible social media site and service and participating in every group and forum you can think of, how do you monitor conversations about you on the social Web? Fortunately, there are tools available that let you search it. Some even let you save and subscribe to the searches you make.
First, check out the following free monitoring tools:
- BackType (http://www.backtype.com)
- BoardReader (http://www.boardreader.com)
- BoardTracker (http://www.boardtracker.com)
- IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com)
- Hootsuite (http://www.hootsuite.com)
- SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com)
If you need more sophisticated and more automatic monitoring, you probably need to use a more advanced paid monitoring tool. These tools, typically available via paid subscription, are better when you're trying to monitor across a large number of sites or if you expect to find a lot of mentions online.
The most popular of these paid monitoring tools include the following:
- Alterian SM2 (socialmedia.alterian.com)
- Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com)
- Scout Labs (http://www.scoutlabs.com)
- Trackur (http://www.trackur.com)