It’s important that you know what’s being said about you and your products so that you can respond to issues and take advantage of positive feedback and trends.  Customers may share their feelings about your product on Twitter or Facebook.  Competitors may target your product or company in one of their advertising campaigns.  You need to be aware of these instances so you can respond to them and take advantage of potential opportunities.

Social media monitoring tools

The world wide web is huge and it’s not possible to be everywhere all the time to see what’s being said. There are a number of different social media monitoring tools that will help you keep on top of things.

1.  Google Alerts – This is one of my favorite social media monitoring tools.  You can request that you be emailed when Google finds instances of your company name, your URL, your product name, etc.   You set up a Google Alert telling Google what to look for and you’ll get an email each time Google finds something.

2.  Topsy – Topsy will let you search the web for anything you want.  Their advanced feature (free) lets you receive an email notification as well.  This is very helpful if you are trying to monitor a competitor to see what they’re doing or you have a targeted campaign on a specific product that you want to keep abreast of.

3.  Twilert – Twilert is just like Google Alerts except it’s focused specifically on Twitter. You can set it up to send you a mention of a word (like a product or your company name) or a link (like the link to your website).  You will receive a digest of all the times it finds your search on Twitter each day. This is a great way to follow hash tags or trends that might be pertinent to your business.

4.  Addictomatic – Addictomatic will automatically scan social networking sites like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, YouTube, Bing web search, and Yahoo blog search for mentions of whatever you like.  These results can be viewed instantly and you don’t have to provide an email address. Visit the site every few days to see what’s going on.

There are a lot of ways you can use social media to promote your company.  It’s important that you monitor the results using some of these social media monitoring tools to make sure you’re not spending your time in ways that aren’t productive. Do you use any other social media monitoring tools? Which ones are your favorite?