BrandKnew September 2013 September 2013 | Page 31

groupisd.com 30 1. Brand Monitoring Tool: Social Mention to rank and they tell you how to make it happen. It also monitors where your pages appear whenever someone types your name or a related keyword into Google. Social Mention is one of the most powerful brand monitoring services available. In addition to aggregating user-generated content that mentions your brand, it also tracks things like brand strength and brand reach. It’s sort of like Google Alerts (discussed below) on steroids. You’ll also be able to build a BrandYourself hub pointing to all your profiles that’s carefully tailored to rank. That hub makes it easy for interested customers, clients or employers to find and interact with you. All around a very helpful, powerful, and intuitive service. Using Social Mention is easy. It will directly link you to any Tweet, comment, post, or update that mentions your brand or your content, making it incredibly easy to interact with real people interested in you. When used correctly, this monitoring tool can help you present yourself as natural, responsive, and personable. 5. Twitter Management Tool: TweetDeck 2. News and Blog Monitoring Tool: Google Alerts Google Alerts has been around for 5+ years, but its usefulness remains steady. It’s still the premier nichemonitoring tool. While Social Mention really shines with social media, Google Alerts is tailored for blogs and news outlets. All you do is plug in a topic you want to keep tabs on, and Google Alerts will act like an idea generation machine. You’ll get updates delivered to your inbox, automatically keeping you up to date and in the know on anything related to your brand or niche. With Google Alerts you can ensure you’re the first person to comment on or retweet important content; your brand will seem ever-present. You can even put an Alert on your own name or website to see when you’re mentioned. You probably didn’t know this, but one of the biggest reasons Twitter is so successful is its API. Twitter was developed with data-use in mind., making it the easiest social network to monitor by far. In fact, Twitter actually has its own brand management tool. It’s called TweetDeck, and it’s described as “an app that brings more flexibility and insight to power users.” Managing your Twitter presence is much, much easier with TweetDeck . Schedule Tweets, monitor what people are saying about you, and keep tabs on the most important conversations in your niche all from one dashboard. Easy. If nothing else, Twitter’s built in search is useful even by itself. If you’ve never done so, spend some time searching around the Tweetosphere. You’ll quickly see just how easy it is to find what people are saying about any given topic. 6. Social Network Management Tool: HootSuite Whether you’re a blogger, marketer or a job-seeker, Google Alerts is one of the most powerful free tools that you’d better be using. HootSuite is sort of like TweetDeck except that it manages multiple social networks. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and, yes, Twitter too. Just like TweetDeck, HootSuite allows you to monitor your brand, start conversations, schedule posts, and analyze data. 3. Social Network Monitoring Tool: FriendFeed Though HootSuite does offer a paid monthly plan, it also has a limited free service that’s definitely worth checking out. FriendFeed is yet another aggregation service. The difference is that it builds a social network around the content it aggregates. FriendFeed has comments, tags, and likes built in just like Facebook or Twitter. FriendFeed is most useful as a networking tool and a competition monitoring tool because it allows you to comprehensively follow important people. Plus, there is legitimate worth to building a presence on FriendFeed. The people who follow you on this platform want to see everything you do, and those are the kind of fans you want around. 4. Brand E