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Seven FREE ways to auto-monitor your online reputation
Seven FREE ways to auto-monitor your online reputation
February 22, 2010
The beauty of the internet is that almost everything in the public domain is searchable. This means that when it comes to tracking your online reputation, all you have to do is head over to Google and tap in your name.
The problem is, you’ll probably also want to search for your company name(s), product name(s), URL(s), and the names of any key personnel. What’s more, different search engines pick up different results, so you’ll need to perform multiple searches to avoid missing mentions. Suddenly, this simple task becomes a bit of a drag.
Here are seven free tools to simplify the task of monitoring your online mentions.
Search engine alerts
Track mentions of keywords in news, websites, blogs, videos and groups with Google Alerts. Set alerts to be sent by email either daily or ‘as-it-happens’ (meaning it hits your inbox as soon as it’s indexed by Google). Alternatively, you can create RSS feed to track from inside your favourite reader.
Bing offers much the same functionality, but for news only. Head to Bing News and select ‘News alerts’ from the bottom of the left hand column. For the same service from Yahoo!, visit Yahoo! Alerts and choose ‘Keyword News’ from the box on the right.
Blog tracking
Blogpulse indexes blogs and helps pick up mentions you might not have spotted via the standard search engines. Just search for your key term and then hit the XML icon at the top of the search results to create an RSS feed. You can also search for all posts linking to your site by choosing ‘URL’ in the search options.
Blogpulse won’t pick up everything, so again it’s a matter of combining this with your other tracking efforts. Try Icerocket, which also offers an RSS feed.
Social media monitoring tools
There a dozens of free tools out there for monitoring social media mentions. My favourite at the moment is Social Media Alerts from Social Mention. It searches through over 100 social media platforms such Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google and delivers daily results by email. Searches via the main site will also give you a sense of sentiment and reach, and tell you which users are driving the conversation.
If you want to monitor the number of click throughs on a link you have tweeted, use the Bit.ly shortener service and from their site you can view analytics for clicks of links within your tweets.
Have I missed any great free tools? Let me know.
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Comments
Hi Avinash - I agree it's definitely a case of trial and error. There isn't a monitoring tool that's head and shoulders above the rest in all areas....at least not in the "free" category...not yet.
DexterityPR - I'm very happy for you to link to the post. I'm sure James / Simon at Marketing Donut towers will be along in a minute to give the official green light :)
Thx for a useful post Emily. I'll link to it if you don't mind
Great post.... There are quite a few free monitoring out there now and each one has its strengths and weaknesses. The best way is to see what works for you and only use ones that are relevant to your campaign.
Thanks, Wayne. Yes the list could go on and on.
Twitter Advance Search is a great and under used tool too: http://search.twitter.com/advanced
And I really like Tweet Reach, for seeing how far a tweet has travelled: http://tweetreach.com/
Ok, I'm sneaking extra tips in under the wire now!
Some great advice, Emily. Though I'm surprised you didn't mention saved searched on Twitter. They're also a good way of tracking people, memes etc.
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