Blog posts tagged buzz

Seven FREE ways to auto-monitor your online reputation

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.

Emily Cagle of Emily Cagle Commmunications