Imagine you’re in a room with a bunch of people, and someone starts complaining loudly about your product to others. Chances are, you’d respond to it – either by persuading them otherwise or addressing the reason for complaint. Now expand the size of the room a thousand-fold. And turn the volume up 10 thousand times louder. And remember that your conversation now has attracted the interest of hundreds of thousands of onlookers. This is the power that social media now has.”
This is the scenario digital strategist Patty Keegan gives me when I ask her why it’s important for brands to stay on top of what’s said about them in social media. Fortunately, monitoring online conversation about your brand doesn’t have to be the daunting (or expensive) task it first appears, thanks to the many free online tools now available.
According to Jacki James, strategic planner for digital agency (if that’s what they call themselves) Zuni, the reasons for managing and monitoring online engagement is three-fold:
• Performance management - is your brand achieving its goals? What is/isn’t working?
• To gather audience insights
• Management efficiency (ie. social media allows you to manage multiple contributors and platforms across teams, publish content away from the office and build custom cross-channel reporting and analytics.
So, exactly what tools are out there to help brands achieve all these things?
Google Alerts
This one is pretty straightforward. Basically, you register for free on Google Alerts and reap the benefits just by checking your inbox. You choose you alert term (for example, your brand name) the type of medium you’d like to search within (blogs, news, discussions, everything, etc.), how often you’d like to be notified of hits (as it happens, once a day or once a week), and provide your email address and presto! Alerts sent to your inbox whenever someone mentions your search term.
Social Mention
Social Mention is very similar to Google Alerts, but for social media. Basically you set up a similar notification system, and Social Mention will alert you whenever your term is mentioned in user-generated online content. It will also calculate a sentiment score for your brand, whether the mentions are positive, negative or neutral.
Basically, Social Mention sniffs out value-conscious terms like ‘good’, ‘loves’, ‘hate’, ‘problems’ and so on,” explains Keegan. Social Mention then calculates on the basis of this usage, whether or not a comment is positive or negative and gives you an overall ratio…to give some idea of sentiment direction.”
As with most free online monitoring tools, Social Mention is limited in that it doesn’t take into account the reach or audience of a blogger or commentator, nor does it acknowledge the context of a positive” or negative” term. I hold little value in automatic sentiment calculations as they don’t account for sarcasm,” says James. While it may not be foolproof, you can use the Twittratr tool in Social Mention to highlight your key word, then you can determine for yourself whether the comment was positive or negative.
TweetDeck
Although TweetDeck is limited to one social-media platform, it does provide a very comprehensive insight into the sometimes-overwhelming world of Twitter. In the one place, you can see you see your feed, plus an ongoing feed of tweets that mention your brand (including retweets), direct messages, popular trends (subjects that are being tweeted about around the world at that moment), plus a feed of tweets containing a hashtag you might be interested in at any given time.
HootSuite
James’ social media-monitoring tool of choice, HootSuite allows the user to track multiple networks, set up custom automated analytics reports and incorporate Google Analytics in the one place. Basically you set up all your social media accounts to create a personalised dashboard, allowing you to update multiple networks in one step. HootSuite’s tracking capabilities are also impressive, allowing you to track mentions by keywords, and review traffic in real-time. It also offers a custom report builder, for which you can choose from pre-made templates.
Yahoo!Clues
This tool helps you analyse what people are searching for online. The most beneficial aspect of this site is that it allows you to compare trends between search tools, so you can compare searches between your brand and a competitor, and find out regional or demographic differences using Trend Analysis.
Of course, not all online commentary was made equal – a comment made by a blogger with a couple of hundred followers has a very different reach to one made by a blogger with several thousand readers. Unless you are using paid tools, your best bet is to investigate a particularly vocal commenter would be to do a search on PeerIndex or Klout,” advises Keegan.
Once you’ve set up TweetDeck, Google Alerts and whatever other tools you think are relevant, how can you use this information to benefit your brand? Keegan says that aside from the immediate feedback these mentions provide you, two of the most interesting factors on a strategic level are the keywords and sources summary. Keywords give you some perspective on the concepts swirling around your brand – that tells you something quite interesting,” Keegan explains. Sources is another summary – where are you being talked about?” Keegan says that many brands might be surprised that most of the comments from whom and on what platforms commentary is popping up.
If you’re still finding this whole social media thing a little hard to swallow, Keegan suggests subscribing to Digital Chameleon’s Jumpstart Social Media eLearning suite for in-depth coursework that covers social strategy, measurement, platforms and campaign planning. You can find out more by emailing Keegan. May we also suggest taking the time to read over bd’s portfolio of features on utilising social media for your brand:
Facebook’s how-to for small business
beautydirectory digital seminar
And if you’d like more info about the digital world, you can read Keegan’s other columns here:
Patty Keegan: A new way to view your social media
Apps-solutely fabulous: A look at three beauty apps
Patty Keegan: Google and Facebook - upping the ante in the social wars