Monitoring Social Media: What's Being Said About Your Company Online?

Just about anybody can talk about just about anything on a social networking site—and that includes your company. It's important to stay on top of what your clients and customers are saying about your business on those sites not just because that information can tell you what you're doing right or wrong. It's also important because of who your clients and customers are talking to. A quick comment about how speedy your service is could wind up in the search results for your business name and could go out to hundreds of potential customers who happen to be reading updates of that nature.

How to Get the Information

Using a tool like Google Alerts to make sure you're notified whenever search engines find new mentions of your company's name online is a good start. But other tools can help you focus on comments about your company specifically on social networking sites. In many cases, you'll actually get more specific information, as well. Technorati.com can be a very useful tool. It's specifically focused on finding blog posts with certain keywords. You can set up reoccurring searches for your business name to keep yourself updated. Similarly, with Search.Twitter.com, you can create an RSS feed for different Twitter searches. You can also narrow down your search, using the advanced search tool. You can specify whether you want to see positive or negative posts to Twitter, or even look for posts that include questions. Other major social networking sites, like Facebook, tend to require you to simply search the site every time you want an update on what's being said about your company.

There are many third party tools that offer to keep you updated on what's being said on social networking sites for a price. As long as you're comfortable checking in with different sites every once in a while, it may be more practical to avoid these tools. Even a minor upgrade to a site like Twitter can break a third party's tool. Since many creators of such tools do limited repairs, it can be less cost effective to take that route.

How to Use the Information

Once you know what is being said about your company online, keep moving forward. Respond to those comments. If a comment is negative, resolving the situation so that an unhappy client might follow up with another comment about how you've fixed his or her problem can build good will for your company. If a customer is commenting about what you're doing right, use that feedback to continue to improve and let your customers know that you value their recommendations for your business. And if you see a question, answer it. That simple step may be enough to convert a prospective customer into a paying customer.

It's useful to have accounts set up for your business on major social networking sites as it can make responding to comments much easier. If you have some time to devote to the project, you can also search and see what people are saying about your industry or products in general. You can use the same search tools with different keywords to find information, which can lead to new customers if you can answer questions or offer an improved experience over one of your competitors.