multiple types of social media. Depending on the social media services you’re using, you might want to select one from each appropriate service category, as well.
The frequency with which you check results from these tools will depend on the overall visibility of your company, the schedule for your submissions to different services, and the overall intensity of your social media presence. For some companies, it might be a daily task. For others, once weekly or even once per month will be enough.
Using free or inexpensive social monitoring tools
Choose one or more of the tools in the following sections to monitor across multiple types of social media.
Brand 24
An affordable brand-monitoring tool, Brand 24 (http://brand24.net) starts at $49 per month, with a 14-day free trial. It includes both sentiment and data analysis to provide a good sense of the buzz around your product, brand, business, or search term. It covers multiple social media outlets, including Facebook and Instagram, with alerts daily or more often. Additional features available with more expensive plans allow you to review customer behavior, actions, and posts.
Google Alerts
One of the easiest and most popular of the free monitoring services, Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) are notifications of new results on up to 1,000 search terms. Alerts can be delivered via email or RSS feed. You can receive results for news articles, websites, blogs, video, and Google books and forums.
You set the frequency with which Google checks for results and other features from your My Alerts dashboard page. Think of Alerts as an online version of a clipping service.
Google Trends
Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) is a useful market research tool. It not only provides data on the hottest current searches, but also compares the number of searches on the terms you enter to the total number of searches on Google overall during the same time frame.
Click the menu icon (three bars) to the left of the word Trends in the header and select the Explore option in the drop-down list. Type the search phrase that interests you in the Add a Search Term field. From Explore, you can choose to refine your research by selecting options from the drop-down lists under Worldwide (location), Past 12 months (time frame), All Categories (topic area), and Web Search (content type.)
Select the Subscriptions option in the drop-down list to receive email notification of trending searches and stories.
HowSociable
Type any brand name at www.howsociable.com, shown in Figure 1-5, to see how visible it is in social media. The free version checks “one brand with 12 different metrics and limited features.” The paid upgrade checks 24 more channels. Click any element for additional details.
FIGURE 1-5: HowSociable provides a social-ranking score based on its definition of popularity.
IFTTT (If This Then That)
If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an automation tool that lets you write a script (called an applet) to receive notifications and accomplish other tasks online. You can easily use IFTTT to manage your online reputation. It’s easiest to browse existing public applets to find one that monitors your desired social media platforms; then tweak the applet to include the search terms you want to monitor.
Mention
Mention (https://mention.com/en) monitors multiple social networks, news sites, forums, blogs, and any web page in 43 languages. It offers several helpful features: one, the capability to export data, filtered by time and source, which allows you to compare your results to competitors’ results; and two, real-time alerts plus a daily or weekly digest by email. Its free basic plan allows one user, one alert, and up to 250 mentions per month but doesn’t include analytics. Paid versions — which have higher limits on the number of alerts, mentions, and users — start at $25 per month for 2 alerts, 3,000 mentions, and 1 user; all plans include a free 14-day trial.
Social Mention
Social Mention (www.socialmention.com/advanced_search) tracks and measures what’s being said about a specific topic in real time across more than 100 social media services. It provides a social-ranking score based on its own definition of popularity — which includes self-defined criteria of strength, sentiment, passion, and reach — for every search.
You can select to monitor only specific services and choose among service categories of bookmarks, blogs, microblogs, videos, images, or all. Although you can input only one term at a time, the results may go back up to 30 days.
http://socialmention.com/tools) to place on your site or in your browser bar. These widgets are simple plug-ins, but your programmer will need to copy and paste the widget code onto your site.
Sprout Social
A high-end package of social media tools, Sprout Social (www.sproutsocial.com) includes a comprehensive monitoring feature that combines all alerts, messages, and actions into a single stream that can be analyzed to discover trends. You can watch for social media comments about your business, brand, products, competitors, or industry topics in near real time. Prices start at $99 per user per month, but the company also offers a 30-day free trial.
