Four Tools To Monitor The Online Conversation
By Anna Johnson on July 7th, 2010One way to boost your online business – including the awareness and reputation of your company/brand/product, website traffic, leads, conversions, sales, etc – is to participate in the ‘online conversation’.
If people are talking about topics of interest to you – whether it’s directly about you, about your industry, or about anything that could, if you joined in the conversation, lead to greater awareness and interest in you and your products – you want to be participating in that discussion.
So how do you know if people are talking about you?
Well, fortunately, there are various tools you can use to track what people are talking about online. You can use these tools to track conversations that include the keywords of your choice (e.g. your company name, your product, or keywords describing certain topics) and anytime the tools pick up mentions of these keywords, they’ll report that to you.
Depending on what tools you use, you can visit a website to check whether your chosen keywords have been mentioned, set up the tool to email you whenever your keywords are mentioned, or create an RSS feed that combines all these reports into one feed you can check in your RSS reader.
In general, you want to track keyword mentions on social networks, blogs, discussion forums/communities, and the web in general. To this end, here are some handy tools to help you do so:
- Google Alerts – monitors mentions of your keywords on the web (i.e. indexed by Google’s search engine).
- Boardtracker.com – tracks mentions on discussion forums or message boards.
- TweetScan – monitors Tweets on Twitter.
- uberVu.com – tracks mentions in social media sites such as Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Google buzz, Friendfeed, Yahoo Buzz as well as blogs.
