What are your customers talking about online?
- Are they talking about you?
- Your competition?
- Your industry?
The conversation could be about anything.
- It could be inquiries for your product/service
- Praise for a competitor
- Complaint or a recommendation to others
Here are 3 easy-to-use tools to help you monitor conversations:
Google Reader
Use Google reader to monitor keywords or key phrases. For example if you are in the solar lights business, you might want to monitor keywords like “lights lighting” (monthly searches 11,100,000), “led lighting” (monthly searches1,500,000) “solar powered” (monthly searches 1,500,000) “outdoor lighting” (monthly searches 550,000) and “outdoor lights” (monthly searches 550,000)
This is how you would set it up. From your Reader Home Screen on the navigation panel on the left click on “Browse for Stuff” on the next page click on the “Search” tab. Towards the bottom of the search page you will find “Track Keywords and Searches” Here you can setup searches for each keyword for different channels – Ebay, Blogs, News and Twitter. You will have to set up individual searches for each keyword and each channel. You can monitor these on your desktop computer or on your smart phone.
Use the “Star” function to mark important ones that need attention.
Alternately you can also use Google alerts to monitor conversations. Google alerts will send you an email when it finds something with your keyword. You can set the frequency of the emails.
Kurrently
Want to check out the competition on Facebook and Twitter use http://www.kurrently.com/ . Kurrently is a free and real-time search engine for Facebook and Twitter. Enter a hash tag or keyword and this search engine will pull up all related conversations from both the platforms.
Twitterfall
Twitterfall http://www.twitterfall.com/ is a Twitter client and a great search tool. Here you can search to follow something you’re interested in or add a list to follow specific groups of people. There is a geolocation panel where you can add an address to see what people are talking about in that area.
Twitterfall gives you a lot of premium features for free, the list is very long. I have listed a few below:
- You can curate tweets on Qrait (A realtime curation platform) right from your Twitterfall
- If you try and tweet longer than 140 characters, Twitterfall asks if you want to use Twitlonger, which truncates your tweet and appends a URL to the Twitlonger page containing your full tweet.
- Some services are a bit spammy. By adding an exclusion like ‘service:badservice’ to your Exclusions list, you can filter tweets from that service out of your Twitterfall.
- If you hover over link that’s been URL shortened. Twitterfall will automatically expand the link, so you don’t have to be worried about where the link will take you.
- Twitterfall allows you to see how a conversation between people has transpired. If the conversation icons appears on a tweet, you can click it and the previous tweets in the conversation will appear below.
- Twitterfall allows you to see the key details about a user. By hovering over a user’s name, a tooltip will appear showing you the main profile details for that user.
- Twitterfall allows you to see a preview of images from several of the popular Twitter image services. By hovering over a picture’s URL, a tooltip will appear showing you a small preview of that image.
- Twitterfall allows you to exclude terms from any future tweets. If you find that a user is using a specific term to spam, then you can block that term.
- Twitterfall allows you to block a specific user from search terms and any tweets that would appear in your Twitterfall. Enter their username into the exclusions box preceded by “from:”.
- Twitterfall will update you on what’s going on even when you’re not looking at the page. The document title will reflect any tweets that may have fallen while you were looking at a different page.
- Twitterfall allows you to change the speed at which tweets fall on the page.
- Want to use Twitterfall at a conference or occasion? Presentation Mode allows you to use the full browser window while also allowing you to enter a heading. You can even place an image URL in the heading area to have an image show up.
- Sometimes you only want to see tweets from a specific area. Using the geolocation panel in Twitterfall, you can now search based on a key term or just based on a geolocation.
- When using Twitterfall during a presentation, you may want to remove tweets that seem unrelated or malicious. This can be done in Presentation Mode by highlighting a tweet and then clicking ‘Remove’.
What social media tools do you use? I’d love to hear about them in the comments box below.
