One of the main reasons that people maintain a social media profile or write a blog is to offer their opinions. These people may not take the time to share their thoughts, good or bad, on your Facebook page.
So what are these people really saying about you?
There are a few online tools you can use which will help you find your actual online presence.
1. Social Mention. Social Mention is an all-in-one social media search engine. It will search blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. While it does check Yahoo and Google News, it won’t look for other news sources.
On the left side of a search page, you’ll see posts divided into positive, neutral and negative stories. Its classification clarification is a little iffy. While using Social Mention for one of the companies I consult, I looked through some of the “negative comments”. The worst comment about the company was “I don’t know much about them.” In my opinion, that’s a neutral comment.
You can have option of signing up for a daily e-mail update, alerting you to any mention.
2. Google Blog Search and Google Alerts. Google has developed some great tools to help you refine your search.
Google Blog Search will sift out blogs from the other web information. This is critical, as looking for blog posts in a generic Google search can be the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Google Alerts will send you an e-mail detailing any search query that you want. You can have an update sent to you once daily, once weekly, or as it happens. You can have Google Alerts check blogs, news, video or all of the above.
3. Twitter Search. Although it may seem limited, Twitter Search is a very powerful marketing tool. The only thing that it searches is Twitter. It may seem too specific and the same results could be easily be found by Social Mention. So why bother? The Social Mention “Microblog” includes Facebook in its search. If your social media marketing plan has different outcomes for each promotional channel (as it should), then Twitter Search help you find Twitter-specific goals.
As with any kind of search, you will want to place every query in quotation makes. Let’s say for example you own King’s Pet Store. If you don’t put quotation marks around the store’s name, the search will include every pet store mention, article on pets, mentions of Burger King and CNN anchor John King … you get the point.
Using these tools can help your online marketing efforts tremendously. If a guy blogs that he absolutely loves your product, you can post that link on your Facebook page and Twitter feed. If another prospect sees that one of his/her peers received great satisfaction from your company and took the time to publish it on the Web, then it must be great. You can also get a better idea of what product line is doing well, and which ones aren’t.
If you find negative comments, you have a great opportunity to contact this person and do a little fence mending. Reaching out to a dissatisfied customer to right a perceived wrong can help make that person a return customer.
