5 Step Free Social Media Monitoring Process

In this post i’m going to create a very easy social media monitoring process that you can follow to monitor yourself and your brand(s) online. While there are monitoring services such as StepRep, Synthesio, Radian6 and so on that allow you to monitor and create analytics, they are not free. I have already wrote an article on Monitoring Your Social Media Initiatives which took a broad approach on this topic. However, this article will focus on those of you who do not currently have the budget for a social media monitoring service and want to follow an easy step-by-step system.

Here are the steps for a free social media monitoring process

Step 1) Create a list of keywords that you would like to keep tabs on. These could be your name, your companies name, your products name, etc. Keywords should be about 5-8 words or strings of words that someone would search for or write about online. These keywords are not necessarily the keywords that you use for your website, they are words that you wish to know if and when people are talking about them. Take these keywords and save them on your computer.

Step 2) Create a schedule for when you will perform your keyword monitoring. It is a good idea to perform the following steps 1-2 times per month. I would suggest doing this twice per month, every two weeks. While this will not give you real time updates and notify you when something is said, you will at least be looking about.

Step 3) Once you have your list of keywords, you are ready to start plugging them into a couple social media aggregation tools. These tools will give you the ability to search across the internet from online one to two locations.

Visit http://www.addictomatic.com. Here you will search for your first keyword. Lets say it is your name… or my name, “Kelsi Guidry”. You will put this name in the field and simply hit “Create”. This will then create search results from various areas of the web based on that keyword. Here you will find Tweets about you, blogs from Google Blog Search, YouTube video, etc. Addictomatic also give you the ability to drag and drop the boxes as you like and then save the URL with your search term.

You can then rinse and repeat with your list of keywords.

Step 4) Visit http://www.socialmention.com. Here you will find a search similar to Addictomatic. You will repeat your keyword search here as well. However, SocialMention will bring up different results and give you more detailed analytics for you search. Here you will be able to see what mentions were positive, neutral, and negative. You can even see where the mentions are coming from and from who.

Repeat your keyword searches here.

Step 5) Create notes based off of what you have found. Write down a few things that you have noticed. Maybe you can write down the number of mentions you had Vs. last week. By jotting down a few notes, you will keep a record of things that are found. These can be used for research on what your customers are saying and what they want. You could also use it to approach a negative blog post about you or your brand/company. You may also want to takes notes to simply judge on an increase or decrease of the amount of information that is out there about you and your brand/company.

Compare your notes with previous notes and share them with co-workers to have everyone on the same page of what is being said.

I hope this simple 5 Step Free Social Media Monitoring Process helps you are someone you know. Are there other free tools that you use besides a few social media aggregators? How often do you plan on monitoring? or if you already, what is your social media monitoring process?