Measuring Social Media for Real-Time Impact

Regardless of whether you have social media profiles and pages, your customers are probably talking about you on networks like Twitter and Facebook. If that doesn’t make your head spin, then the fact that they are talking about your business 24/7 – and not just during business hours – might. This makes social media a full time, around the clock job. It’s not just something you can set and forget.

The Challenge

Thanks to the businesses that are online, replying to tweets and Facebook posts, your customers probably expect your business to have the same reaction time. While there are awesome social media monitoring tools, your small business may not have the money to invest in them. Fortunately, there are both free and premium ways to monitor brand mentions.

Free Monitoring Tools & Strategies

First, let’s look at some free monitoring tools and strategies you can use to monitor your business on social media.

HootSuite

If you want to keep up on people mentioning your business on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, then HootSuite is a good solution to try. It is free for up to five social profiles – just connect your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ page to your HootSuite account, then use the Add Stream option for each account to create searches for your business name, unique products, and services.

You can then monitor what people are saying about your business in real time without having to worry about whether they have specifically mentioned your @username on Twitter or posted on your Facebook wall.

Direct URLs

Since some networks don’t work with management tools, you can also use the following URLs to find mentions of your website on social media. Just replace domain.com with your own website or change it to just your business name to find mentions.

• https://twitter.com/search?q=domain.com

• https://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?q=domain.com&type=eposts

• https://plus.google.com/s/domain.com/posts

• http://www.linkedin.com/signal/?type=updates&keywords=domain.com&pplSearchOrigin=GLHD&pageKey=member-home&search=Search

• http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=domain.com

• http://pinterest.com/source/domain.com/

These URLs will give you the latest mentions of your brand on these networks.

Premium Monitoring Tools

If you would rather have a more robust monitoring tool for your brand’s social media mentions, here are some you can choose from.

• Sprout Social – Sprout Social provides comprehensive social media monitoring tools to monitoring your brand & track business mentions across the web. You can also use it to manage your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Pricing starts at $39 per month.

• Viralheat – Viralheat provides comprehensive social monitoring. Monitor Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Websites, Pinterest, Youtube and Google+ for brand, product or competitor mentions. You can also use it to manage your social media accounts. Pricing for plans including social media monitoring searches start at $99 per month.

• Trackur – More than 60,000+ registered users trust Trackur to monitor 10+ million media mentions a day across more than 100+ million news sites, blogs, forums, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook! Plans start at $27 per month.

• Social Report – Have mentions of your business or other keywords that interest you delivered to your inbox daily along with recent activity from your top social networks, data from Google Analytics, and much more. Pricing for plans including social media monitoring searches start at $39 per month.

• SumAll – With 30,000 customers and growing, SumAll currently supports all the popular social media services including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Connect all your accounts to SumAll and track the impact your social activity is having on the community. Starts at $9 per month.

Your Response Needed

So what should you do when you find mentions of your business on social media? Respond, of course. Even if the mention is a negative one, your response will show people that you are involved, you care about what your community says, and you are always open to trying to make things right.

Some responses, however, can’t be made in 140 characters or on social media networks.  For those instances, just let the person know that you would like to contact them for more details to help them find a resolution via email or phone. Regardless whether you receive a response from the person who mentioned your business, just putting the offer out there makes a big difference!

How does your business handle social media monitoring and response? Please share in the comments!

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. You can follower her on Twitter and Google+.