If you’re monitoring Twitter and Google for mentions of your brand or website, you’re probably only seeing half of the conversation. What about people that shorten your URLs and share them without linking to your Twitter profile? What if someone mentions your brand name in the comments of someone else’s blog? Do you even know where to go to find this kind of information. We at Magicomm run into this problem from time to time and have adopted a small set of tools as part of our monitoring strategy to help keep us in the loop.
To solve the problem of not getting notified when people link to our blog using a shortened URL, we use a service called BackTweets. It basically shows us everyone linking to our site or specific pages on Twitter. It’s also a great way to surprise people by thanking them for the RT when they never mentioned your Twitter handle.
Now what about comments scattered across multiple forums and social media sites. SocialMention is an all powerful mention aggregator. You can search for mentions across blogs, forums, micro-blogs, Q&A sites and more. It’s one of the better free tools out there for monitoring your brand.
These two tools in conjunction with Twitter search and Google search should give you a more realistic picture of who’s talking about you and sharing your content. So don’t listen to just half of the conversation. Become the ultimate eye in the sky and really see what’s going on.
- Photo by BL1961
