otiti paki: How to track what people are saying about you online

No matter what size business you have, it?s important to keep track of what?s being said about you online. Whether your company is being mentioned on forums, review sites, social media, or anywhere else on the web, with proper tracking you can gain valuable feedback, see what people are looking for, and get competitor insights.

Best of all, you don?t have to spend any money doing it or waste time trawling the web for mentions ? it can all be automated for you. Read on to find out more.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts helps you set up emails or a feed to track keywords and phrases of your choice. Broadly speaking, when content is published on the web which includes your phrase, you will automatically be notified. There are plenty of options so you can have general summaries or a comprehensive list of everything as and when it happens, depending on your needs.

It?s easy to go a bit crazy with adding words and phrases, but try to resist temptation or you?ll end up with an inbox full of lengthy emails that you can?t face reading. The best approach is to start with a few essential terms, and then add and remove alerts depending on how useful you find them. Keywords and phrases tend to work better for tracking when they?re very specific, i.e. a company name rather than something generic such as ?web hosting? (on the other hand, if you?re looking for content inspiration or collecting URLs for a roundup blog post rather than tracking your own business, generic keywords can work pretty well).

Always review your Google Alerts and settings every few months to tweak them and ensure you get the most use out of them. Don?t be scared to ditch ones you aren?t using.

Social Media Tracking

Tools like Hootsuite and TweetDeck allow you to create fixed search columns which automatically update when someone on Twitter publicly posts a particular word or phrase. This helps you catch more mentions of your business in addition to regular @ replies/mentions that specifically include your username.

As the image above shows, our searches are set up so that if your tweet includes any of the following, we?ll see it:

? Heart Internet
? HeartInternet
? heartinternet.co.uk (including any URLs relating to the domain)
? #heartinternet

As well as seeing what people are saying about you/your company, you can also set up columns with more generic words and phrases relating to your industry to help you gain sales leads or keep on top of the latest news or mood. If you have specific core products or product categories, they may be worth tracking too.

Searching Google+

Google+ has a handy feature which lets you search for all public posts relating to a particular keyword or phrase. You can search by ?Best of? or ?Most recent?, and you can also filter by the types of content you want to see.

This is great for seeing how people are sharing your links even if they don?t tag you in a post.

Pinterest pins from your website

To see what people have pinned from your website, simply go to http://www.pinterest.com/source/ and then add your domain name to the end (e.g. http://pinterest.com/source/heartinternet.co.uk). As well as providing an insight into what people like about your website, it also gives you the opportunity to comment, like, repin or otherwise interact with customers and potential customers.

Do you try and track what people are saying about your business online? Let us know in the comments!

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Name:Jenni Brown

About:Jenni is Heart Internet's SEO & Social Media Marketing Executive and is responsible for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ activity. Jenni also manages various projects and campaigns for the Marketing department, including the Website of the Month competition.

Source: http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/blog/2012/10/how-to-track-what-people-are-saying-about-you-online/

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