In order to effectively manage your Social Media Marketing you 100% need to know whenever somebody talks about you online.  While it is impossible to track every time you or your brand is mentioned, there are a number of tools available that make finding out about any significant conversations involving your brand.

If you are serious about your social media marketing (and you should be), you are going to want to find these conversations, and join in without intruding, without being defensive or overbearing.

Things you will Need
Before we go any further I am going to first assume you have a Twitter account for your brand.  You will also need a Google account.

The two tools we are going to use to monitor your social presence are Hootsuite and Google Alerts.

Hootsuite


Hootsuite is an amazing suite of Twitter tools that allows you to manage a number of Twitter accounts, track direct messages, track brand mentions, track traffic from links you’ve posted amongst other things.

You will need to setup a Hootsuite account and then provide your user account with the login credentials to your Twitter account so Hootsuite can manage all your data.

Once you are fully up and running, I would recommend monitoring Hootsuite account on a daily basis to see if anybody is talking about your brand.  If they are, feel free to participate in the conversation.

Google Alerts


Somehow Google Alerts has managed to stay a little known gem amongst most companies.  Google Alerts is an absolutely fantastic tool for keeping track of when your brand is mentioned on web sites, blogs and other web mediums.

Head over to http://www.google.com/alerts and within a minute you can setup a daily email that will send you every mention of your brand or keyword.

So what should I put in the different fields?

Search Terms: Enter your brand in the ‘search terms’ field.
Type: Choose Comprehensive, it provides you access to all the different mediums (News, Blogs, Web, Video and Groups)
How Often: This is really up to you and depends how often your brand is being mentioned.  If you don’t get mentioned a lot you might want to do as-it-happens, however I personally prefer to get a daily email.  If you choose Once a Day, you will get all the days mentions in one email.
Email Length: You have two options for email length, either 20 results or 50 results.  This is really dependant on how frequently you are being talked about.
Deliver To: I personally have mine sent to my email, but if you prefer RSS, change the deliver to field to Feed and you will get a unique URL complete with all your Google Alerts.

Feel free to create as many alerts as you want!

Now that you are armed with the basics, start tracking your brand, and start learning from your customers

Notable Urls:

http://www.hootsuite.com
http://www.google.com/alerts