Monitoring your company’s reputation online is just as important as your efforts to boost your web presence and promote brand recognition. You need to find out what people are saying about you as soon as possible: so you can learn, and so you can catch and handle any negative mentions as soon as possible. Here are some ways you can monitor the web for your company.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is perhaps the simplest way to track mentions of your company online. With this service, you ask Google to let you know anytime it indexes a new page that contains your company’s name, or whatever keywords you specify. You can set up Google Alerts for certain types of content or for the entire web, and you can decide the frequency with which Google sends you reports. Set up Alerts for multiple different keywords, and then just wait for notification in your inbox.
Social Mention
Social Mention, as the website says, is “like Google Alerts but for social media.” It works the same way. You can specify search queries and keywords, like your company’s name, and Social Mention will let you know anytime your name comes up. The search is for social networks, but it includes more than 80 of them, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, and more.
Trackur
Trackur is a professional service that costs at least $18 per month, but it will provide you with comprehensive tracking and analysis. Trackur will keep track of anytime your company’s name is mentioned online, in social media, search engines, forums, and more. It goes a step beyond, however, and provides you with a very useful, in-depth analysis of what people are saying about your company. They will even assess how positive or negative current opinions are, how passionate people currently are about your company or topics, and how far your company’s name is reaching.
Tweet Beep
Tweet Beep will track your company’s name, or whatever keywords you request, on Twitter. It will continually monitor for related tweets, #hashtags, links, and mentions, and you can be notified about them as often as you’d like. Tweet Beep is free, but an upgrade to Tweet Beep Premium for $20 per month will record up to 200 Twitter mentions at a time.
Yahoo and MSN Alerts
Yahoo and MSN have their own search engines, and they also have their own Alerts. These Alerts work just like Google Alerts, so you can customize your keyword and search criteria. They’ll search all over the web, but the difference is that they’ll each give priority to their own respective search engines. This variety can serve as a great safety net to help make sure you’re hearing about all the mentions you should.
Google Search
Finally, Google yourself! Typing your own company name into Google’s search engine, or using a variety of different keywords and Boolean search techniques, you can filter through and interpret all of Google’s results on your own. Also make use of special Google search engines that target just blogs, just videos, and more, and further segment your search as needed.
This valuable marketing article was prepared for you by Travis Lee of SEOMAP – the keyword strategy experts.