One of the most challenging online media for a small business to monitor their online reputation is social media. The sheer volume of the number of social media users and the number of social conversations that take place is phenomenal. However trying to monitor these conversations does not need to be difficult thanks to 4 easy- to -use free social media tools.
Tool #1 Twitterfall.com
This free resource helps you monitor what people are saying about your business on Twitter. It provides results in real time and has some great settings that are perfect for a small local business. These settings include:
* Keywords- you can add one or multiple keywords. Each keyword comes with a color so that a keyword’s tweets will be highlighted in a particular color for easy viewing.
* Geo-location- this setting is perfect for a small business because you can specify which location you want to gather tweets from, which makes more sense since most of the people tweeting about your local business will probably be doing so in your local area. You simply add your location town/city and the number of miles around your location you want to collect tweets from (ranges from 10-200 miles)
* Language- you can choose a language setting which is helpful if your customer base uses a particular language apart from English such as Spanish or Chinese.
Tool#2 SocialMention.com
This free resources creates social media alerts for you, just the same way Google/Yahoo alerts work, but is tailored for social media activity.
Tool#3 Kurrently.com
Kurrently.com is a social media search engine that gets results from Facebook and Twitter. Twitter does have its own search engine, though Facebook doesn’t, so by using Kurrently you can search both social media sites in one place.
Tool#4 Blekko
This is a search engine that has a unique slash tag feature to filter results to a more accurate level than normal search engines. So if you want to search for blogs talking about your company, you would type “company keyword/blogs”. If you want just what’s on twitter or facebook, you would use “keyword/twitter” or “keyword/facebook”.
Blekko has its own slash tags but you can create your own, store them and share them with other people like your employees.
