Good Afternoon, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today I want to look at how you can monitor what you are up to on your social networks, plus what other people are saying about you.  To me this seems to be a job that grows daily as another network starts up, so how do I keep track of all the wonderful things that are being said about me?

Option 1:

Visit each network daily and do a search…. = way way too time consuming

Option 2:

Use Google Alerts to get sent an update daily of what is being said, however I have found that this doesn’t give you all social media, usually I just get my blog post sent back to me!

Option 3:

Try using Social Mention.  This is a FREE social media real-time monitoring website where not only does it monitor in real-time, but it also trails through over 100 social media sites for you, including all the biggies!  I think I’m in love!  You can also get the alerts sent to you (email or RSS) and they can be downloaded as a CSV file.  You can see if what people are saying is positive or negative, when the last time you were mentioned was, the top key words, the top mentioners, the top hash tags and the top sources.

Option 4:

Addict-o-matic is another free social media monitoring site, however although it looks pretty you can’t download the results, or set up an alert.  It seems to be very basic, good if you are a visual person, and it splits up the results by social media, but negative/positive comments aren’t monitored nor does it say which sites it does monitor, I don’t know who mentioned me without clicking through or where was the top place.  Nice images, but to me Social Mention gets the prize.

What should you be monitoring?

It depends on your business, how big it is, what the competition is like in your segment and what you want to achieve from the monitoring.  If you just want to see who is talking about you personally then just have an alert on your name, and then wait for all the lovely comments to flood in and make you feel good.  I suspect that is not the reason that most people want to use it, most people want to monitor what is being said about their business or their brand.  The reason for this is so that they can talk to any unhappy customers and make them happy again, see if there are fans that they could be engaging with or just see how a specific campaign has been passed on virally.  You may also be interested in seeing what your competitors are up to,  so that you can see how you compare to them and who is talking about them – could they be talking about you?  There are more high-tech paid versions of social media monitoring, but using a site like Social Mention is a good place to start.

I’m now off to check out exactly what people think of the Social Rabbit brand, so far I know that there are 7 positive comments to a negative one, which sounds good to me, but I wonder how it compares with others?  That’s for another blog post.  If you want to tell me what you think of Social Rabbit (to save me waiting for you to tweet it, or post it on Facebook) please put a comment below