Yesterday, I went through a couple of examples on how folks can track social media activities during a workshop for ABAF (the Australia Business Arts Foundation) “Making the most of social media”. Here’s a follow-up entry with yesterday’s walkthrough (in screenshot form!) and reference links. If you were unable to attend yesterday’s workshop, you can view the presentation online here.
Google Alerts
If you don’t have time to regularly monitor social media feedback, Google Alerts is a great way to bring the results to your inbox via email alerts delivered as-it-happens, once a day or once a week.
If you are planning to monitor a large number of key terms (more than 20), create a list first before submitting these key words.
1. Go to Google Alerts
2. Add your keywords/keyterms in the main search bar. You can preview results to see if the keyword/keyterms provide the most relevant search results.
3. Choose the type of result you are looking for. I usually choose ‘Everything’ because the emailed alerts are divided by content type anyway.
4. Choose the frequency of the alert. I usually choose ‘As-it-happens’ but only because I’m interested in finding the results straight away.
5. Choose the volume. I usually choose “All results” because I have to time to monitor and go through all results but I trust “Only the best results” would be relevant if you don’t have the time.
Tips:
- Include variations of your website links (ie eventsinbrisbane.com, twitter.com/eventsbrisbane, facebook.com/eventsbrisbane) of your search results as well – it’s interesting to see if there are any mentions to these links.
- To avoid cluttering up your inbox (especially if you have a large number of alerts set up), it’s a good idea to create an inbox rule to automatically forward Google Alerts into a specific folder.
Twitter
I’ve monitored Twitter searches manually because the keywords/keyterms that I want to monitor are constantly changing.
If you have a Twitter account, sign in, search for the hashtags, keywords, keyterms and press “Save this search”. You can also set up Google Alerts to monitor mentions of a Twitter name/hashtag, which is what I did last year.
There are third party websites/apps available (ie Monitter) but they pull out the search results from the Twitter site anyway. Some of these third-party sites are helpful beyond just pulling out tweets. One of the sites that I’ve used before is Twazzup which pulls out results according to media type, influencers, related hashtags and more:
Twazzup is great in monitoring mentions/hashtags related to specific live events because of the TPH (Tweets Per Hour) on the top right. I have used Twazzup to monitor Riverfire (an large scale event in Brisbane) since 2009, you can read a blog post here.
Facebook
Facebook is constantly adding to their platform. Some new finds recently…
Facebook Pages
For Page administrators, Facebook Insights is a very useful tool. Go to the Page that you administer and click on ‘Insights’ on the left menu:
You can also access your Insights tool via ‘Edit Page’ and ‘Insights’. However, note that:
On 15 December 2011 this tool will stop collecting data. All your information is already being collected for you in the new Pages Insights. All data from this page will be deleted on 15 February 2012, so please export anything that you want to keep.
There are extra metrics on top of the number of Likes – buzz (who is talking about the page) and check-in’s (if users can check-in on your location via the Facebook app). This is found in the left-hand menu of all pages.
Facebook also has a new Page Recommendations feature which is really great to view messages/recommendations by users. I can’t seem to find in the Pages (?) but screenshots are available here.
Facebook Search
Facebook Search is really versatile – you can search for and obtain results from public posts, group posts, and more around a particular event, topic, link, brand. I can’t take a screenshot of this, by do a search for a website link (either yours or a popular one like guardian.co.uk) to see the amount of times users have shared links of that particular site. You can also public posts of your site link or search term via “Public posts” (on that note, I pretty much made a beeline to double check my settings…).
More links
There are a number of social media monitoring tools available – some are free, others are freemium or available for a trial period. It really depends on what you are looking for – corporates such as Virgin will have full-time staff members for Twitter to deal with the amount of feedback whereas early-career creatives will be doing it DIY all the way 
Pamorama: 20 Top Twitter Monitoring and Analytics Tools
30 Useful Social Media Monitoring Tools: Out of that list, I recommend that you check out: Hootsuite, Social Mention, Tweetdeck and Facebook Search.
48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools: Do check out Klout, Topsy, TweetReach (note: if you are planning to monitor event-centred tweets, download the full report straight after the event to get the most out of it).
Essential
Google Analytics! Not mentioned in the workshop but GA provides a lot of insights into your website traffic from social media and other sources.
Any more?
Would love to know any other recommendations that you have of sites and services to use, especially the packages such as Radian6 and Dialogix.
