Look, Talk, Listen – An introduction to tracking social media

Much has been written about how to employ social media, engage in conversation and harness its power. More companies are now getting involved in the medium and more importantly, are starting to use it properly to market themselves and their products.  However, a major deterrent of implementing a social media strategy so far has been the difficulty that companies have faced in tracking return on investment and results gained. But where there’s a will there’s a way; and a number of social media tracking tools are now starting to surface, allowing you to locate and analyse where your brand, product or keywords are being talked about across the social space. As with any new technology there are a number of facets that can be discussed; advantages, disadvantages, implementation, analysis and management to name a few. But I’m going to keep things simple and start this week with a brief introduction into what tools are available.

Feed Readers

This is probably the most important element of your listening strategy. Most of the tools used to listen to the social media landscape are based around RSS technology and feeds. This means you gather a lot of information on an hourly basis. In order to organise this information and sift through it to gather the benefits from ‘listening’, you need a tool that gathers it all in one place. This is essentially what your ‘reader’ is used for. Also called feed aggregator, news reader, rss reader or search aggregator there are many free tools available; however, like all things web related Google has got in there and dominated the field. So the most used RSS aggregator is Google Reader; it is accessed online and has basic, easy to use functionality allowing the collation of a number of RSS feeds that can be read, sorted and shared. There are desktop alternatives, the only difference being that they can be accessed offline and subscribe to ‘secure’ feeds, but these are largely slower and have limited access. The most popular of the offline offering is FeedDemon, as it allows access from multiple machines and some of the best functionality.

Which feeds to subscribe to?

Social media, as we all know, exists in almost every space across the web. Having or contributing to a blog is common practice amongst the web 2.0 generation. If you’re engaging in a social media strategy then your brand or products could be being talked about almost anywhere. But rather than trawling through reams of individual blog pages, subscribing to their RSS feed and adding it to your chosen reader, there are a number of free tools that will do that for you. The following list is by no means exhaustive and obviously, every industry has specific news sites and RSS feeds that you may wish to subscribe to on an individual basis as well. But by visiting the following tools, and searching for your company, product or a selection of keywords you can firstly see where you’ve been mentioned, and by who, then you can add the RSS link to your chosen reader and view all future information there.

Socialmention.com – this pulls information from blogs, news feeds and even some video results. It’s simple and has some extra information such as positive/ negative ratings of the results, top keywords and top sources.

Monitter.com – this is a Twitter specific tool that brings back the most recent tweets which include your keyword / brand name / competitors name etc.

Technorati.com – another all round feed this tool may overlap with Social Mention, but it’s worthwhile collating a large list of feeds first to ensure you capture everything, and you can always deleting ones that you don’t find useful at a later date.

Tinker.com – focusing on social networks this tool connects to your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Friend Feed to bring back results that are personal and relevant based around the searches you make.

Boardtracker.com – this useful tool scans comments and posts within forums and discussion boards. This will provide a valuable contribution to your social monitoring should you want to answer questions and solve consumer problems.

There are also a number of paid for tools that combine gathering, reading and analysing information into a powerful social media solution. Currently Radian 6 and Pluck are among the big players, with Trackur positioning itself as a cheaper alternative; but I’m sure that as this technology grows and more companies demand tools to measure their social media campaigns more advanced software will emerge.

Integrating social media tracking into your strategy

Tracking social presence through RSS feeds will certainly give companies a more transparent view of how their social strategies are being received in social communities. And it may help boost the credibility of social media as a valuable, revenue driving medium. It’s important not to rely purely on these new tracking tools but combine them with applications that already exist. For example, combining analytics data on traffic sources with real time data on what’s actually being said can help a company to ascertain whether referrals and links to their website are positive, high quality and valuable, or whether some brand reputation management is in order.