How to Track and Analyze Social Media Activity for Your Business

Social media monitoring has increasingly become a crucial practice in gauging who said what about your business and the degree of positive and negative sentiments associated with the opinions. As an integral part of prospect/customer engagement, marketers can harness SMM for improving customer service, minimizing damage control, projecting a better brand image, identifying potential brand influencers and advocates and basically keeping tabs on your industry or niche (for further information, read “6 Ways Social Media Monitoring Can Benefit Your Business“). The sentiment data acquired through SMM can also be analyzed to determine future improvement to social media marketing campaigns and the products/services themselves.

The metrics to monitor and measure are spelt out in “The Ultimate System For Tracking Engagement On Social Media“, but not all metrics matter to you until they align and contribute to your engagement goals.

Social media monitoring tools can run the whole gamut from being easy-to-use to being highly sophisticated, from being free to costing a monthly subscription (do a Google search for them). You can easily set up a simple tool like Google Alerts to notify you of certain keywords. These notifications will bring you to the keywords’ mentioning sources whereby you can respond to comments or opinions. For a start this is pretty straightforward for newbies. As you sieve through the data, it gets pretty interesting to learn what others have been talking about in relation to your business, products/services, niche or industry.

It gets a little heady if you need to canvass more data, but don’t worry. I list out 5 free ways you can monitor and act upon the data you are targeting in the major social networks.

1) Check Twitter for chatter about business (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or HootSuite to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. With these tools, you can save searches and react via the tool itself without needing to log into Twitter. Alternatively, since Twitter has discontinued its own native RSS feeds, follow this workaround to create your Twitter feeds and include them in feedly.

2) Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check your Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3) Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your company page’s Facebook Insights. Scan your fans and page views count. If you are a member of a group, check to see if any new discussions started.

4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your RSS reader e.g. feedly, as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website.

5) Use your RSS reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others (2.5 minutes): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!

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