In this final installment of our introduction to social networking, we look at ways that small business owners can track what customers are saying about their products and services online.
One of the biggest challenges in the social networking universe is getting a handle on your online reputation: what are your customers saying about you and what should you do about it? It’s one thing if you’re relying on your business Facebook or LinkedIn page to gauge customer feedback and respond to potential inquiries. However, there could be hundreds of other online conversations taking place across myriad social networks and online forums that you can’t easily track.
Fortunately, there is a new wave of online services popping up to capitalize on this emerging need to track online mentions. Two of the most popular are Google Alerts and Social Mention, and small businesses are starting to discover just how vital these tools can be to take the online pulse of their business.
Google Alerts
Let’s start with Google Alerts. As the brainchild of the search marketing and indexing giant, Google Alerts is already being widely used by consumers and business owners to track a wide range of online activity, including competitor announcements, news stories, events, celebrity gossip and sports scores. However, with the increasing proliferation of user-generated content across networks, blogs, and corporate web sites, Google Alerts is becoming an essential part of the small business owner’s tool kit. Rather than generate real-time search results, Google Alerts sends activity alerts directly to your email inbox. This can be a very useful way to track the number of times your business is being mentioned, in what context and whether there is an opportunity for you to respond.
Strengths:
- Leverages Google’s leadership position in search technology
- Provides a simple interface with the ability to manage multiple alerts
- Allows you to track user-generated content sources like blogs and groups, and also comprehensively (a large number of sources grouped within a single search)
Social Mention
Rather than the Google Alerts barebones approach to monitoring, Social Mention is a bit more sophisticated. Instead of functioning purely as an alerts-based utility, Social Mention allows you to take the real-time pulse of your search topic (like your business or product/service name), with results presented in a detailed view that provides both a qualitative (measuring positive or negative perceptions) and quantitative analysis (numerical mentions). Social Mention also provides the option to set up Google-style alerts delivered to your mailbox, so you can choose the monitoring approach that works better for you (real-time and on-demand vs. automated).
Strengths:
- Flexibility to choose monitoring method
- Qualitative or sentiment-based scores – helpful for tracking the overall perception of your product or service
- Ability to track an exhaustive range of user-generated content sources (blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, events, news, questions, etc.).
Potential Drawbacks
While monitoring your company’s social presence is an important component of any social networking strategy, both of these tools come with potential drawbacks. In the case of alerts and search results, it will be necessary to filter through a wide range of mentions that have nothing to do with your product, service or company. That can be frustrating for the busy business owner who simply doesn’t have time to filter through dozens of potential alerts and search results. In the case of Social Mention, overall trends may be skewed since it can be challenging to get an accurate read of mentions that pertain exclusively to your business or offering.
BizAssist recommends that small business owners should start to experiment with these free online tools. The sooner you start, the sooner you can begin to refine your search and alert strategy to get a more accurate read of your business’ online reputation. While not perfect, these tools make it infinitely easier to manage the ever-growing array of online user-generated content sources.