3 Ways to Get Started with Social Media

It’s everywhere: Join Twitter! Create a Facebook page! There is a general push for businesses to be active in social media. So what do most businesses do? They create a Facebook page. They open a Twitter account.

And then wait.

Creating a Facebook page is easy. Let’s face it anyone can start a blog. But then what?

And that’s where most companies struggle. Why are we doing this?

Before even opening that account, I would suggest to start by listening or what is referred to as “monitoring” in the social media world.

I did this at our company and it was quite interesting to see what it yielded. Our customers were not that vocal or active on Twitter. Why? Probably because they run a mission critical piece of software and when it goes down they need service fast.  They know that if they call our Customer Support they will get a person on the other end of the line. But every company is different. You may find tons of people talking about your product and providing valuable insight.

That’s not to say that we didn’t create a Twitter profile but we decided we would use it more to interact and follow other industry players.

So how can you listen and start monitoring what’s happening out there?

Here are 3 simple ways to start listening to what is being said about YOU:

Tweetbeep: Monitor how your brand is being discussed in the twittersphere. You can set up alerts to be notified every time your product, brand or you are being mentioned. I have set Tweetbeep to give me daily updates on my brand, as well as those of my competitors!

SocialMention: performs real time searches of the ‘universe’ for any mention of your brand/keywords/competitors, in blogs, news, microblogs, forums etc and provides a rating for the returned search. Alerts can also be setup to return results on a daily basis. Create alerts on your brand, product, service, your name as well as your competitors.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You should create alerts on your company name, your name, your product, brand, and even your competitors!

Now that you’ve set up these alerts, you’ll start to see where your brand is being talked about. Perhaps it’s in forums or on particular blogs or on Twitter. The key is before you dive in you will have an idea of where to go!

Have you set up alerts? Do you find it helpful?