Top three free Twitter tools for brand reputation management

Twitter claim that their users generate 65 million Tweets a day. That’s a lot of conversations happening, and some of these could be discussing your brand, looking for the service you offer and talking about your products. 

We’ve had a look at many tools which can be used to monitor brands and phrases on Twitter over the last few months. We’ve listed below what we think are some of the most effective and simple to use tools that that brands can e to monitor conversations related to their brand and product names

Twitter Search

One of the easiest ways to monitor a particular keyword, brand or product name is to conduct a search at Twitter Search. By clicking on the RSS feed for that search query (which is located at the very top of the right sidebar) and add it to your RSS reader you can easily keep track of any keywords, brand name or service that you are interested in almost as fast as they are mentioned on Twitter, as any mention of that keyword or phrase will display directly in your RSS reader instantly! Set up multiple searches and you’ll be off!

Monitter

Monitter lets you “monitter” the Twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying in real time. Just type three words into the three search boxes displayed on the site’s home page (where it says ‘monitter’ now) and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

This is a really useful tool to track what people are saying about keywords specific to your brand. You can also specify which location you are interested in. I searched for people tweeting about web design, SEO and online marketing within 50 miles of our Bournemouth office. Within a couple of seconds a tweet came up from someone looking for an SEO specialist, I checked his profile and saw he was in Bournemouth, so then sent a direct tweet to inviting him to give us a call. One possible bit of new business right there!

Twitter Analyzer

Twitter Analyzer is by far the best Twitter App seen in a long while for providing details about your activity on Twitter. It is incredibly comprehensive and shows data on almost everything, including who you follow, who re-tweets your messages, what you’re talking about, how quickly your Twitter network has grown since you’ve been involved, the geographic location of your followers, the volume of your followers who are online at different times of the day, etc.

And don’t forget, you can also find out a huge amount of information about the ins and outs of your competitor’s Twitter accounts as well!

Monitoring your online reputation is incredibly important. These tools allow you to find out who is saying what about your brand as well as how effectively you are managing your Twitter presence. Twitter is a great way for small businesses to strike up conversations with customers and future customers, if you have any success stories yourself or know of any Twitter tools that need to be mentioned, get involved and leave me a comment.

3 ways we think social media will change in 2011

Social media has seen astonishing growth in recent years, with sites accruing huge numbers of followers in recent years. Just recently Facebook announced it now has a staggering 500 million users registered on the site, an increase of around 150million in only six months. Twitter now has 190 million users and is often referred to as one of the fastest adopted media platforms, these are both followed by Linkedin which has roughly 70million users (June 2010)
So with 2010 seeing such surges in growth across a plethora of social media platforms, what can we expect in 2011, and can it in any way surpass the innovation and continued mass adoption we have seen this year?

The Importance of Location
We saw foursquare launch in March 2009 but it was 2010 that saw this website and app experience huge success. As of March 2010 Foursquare reported 725,000 users, with a growth rate of around 100,000 every two weeks for the prior month. And only a few weeks ago on 19th August 2010 we saw Facebook launch their rival, ‘Facebook Places’, their geolocation check-in service which works on a similar premise to Foursquare by allowing their users to share their current locations with friends, enabling them to see who is nearby. We predict that this extension of the already globally adopted Facebook will massively increase the use of location based social media, and as accessibility increases we will see 2011 be the year of the Facebook and Foursquare show down. Although it’s interesting to note that on the launch day of Facebook places Foursquare recorded a record number of new signups, could this be a sign that Facebook places will not be the death of Foursquare but the making of it? Definitely one to watch in 2011.

Picture from: www.tnooz.com

Money Money Money

Well online currency that is. It’s already been suggested that Facebook are planning the launch of Facebook credits, their own payment method that would see them scooping a percentage of revenue for products sold within the games and apps on the site. Currently these apps use other payment methods such as Paypal, but we predict that in 2011 there will be a great focus on Facebook increasing revenue from current users, as they reach saturation point and the number of new users gradually beings to decrease.

I heard from a little birdie
Promoted tweets were launched in April of 2010 and we predict that as we move into 2011 that these will be rolled out and be available to the masses. With the growth rate Twitter has seen, why wouldn’t businesses want to capitalise on this? And with many companies becoming more Twitter savvy and using the platform in ingenious ways to reach prospective customers, this will add another string to any online marketing strategy; could promoted tweets be the social media equivalent of pay per click ads?

Google operators and their impact on SEO

It’s not only experts that use the Google advanced search operators on a daily basis to help cut down on returned search results, now everyday users are also integrating these into their searches. Google returns hundreds of thousands, if not millions of results for any given search term and most people don’t often go past the first three pages of these, so why not use any tools available to make these results more specific? This is where the Google Advanced search operators come in. These advanced operators enable you to search in a much more detailed manor enabling you to get much more precise results.

Bing have recently capitalised on this insight with their television advertising campaign which focuses on ‘information overload’ and how their SERP attempt to overcome this problem, and recently Google have introduced yet more ways of searching. These cut the amount of results given and leave those that are returned being much more tailored, making searching quicker and easier. Some of the search commands that Google supports are as follows:

Related :domain – this will list websites that are similar or related to the domain given. This could be an extremely useful tool for finding websites to contact for relevant link exchanges. To make this work you don’t need to use the http:// bit at the front.

- (and +) - this will remove pages that contain the given term from results, for example south Africa – world cup will show all pages containing the words ‘south africa’ but NOT those related to the world cup.

Allintitle:search term – this ensures that results are very accurate to you search term as the title will have to contain all words you search. This one is highly useful for SEO purposes as it can help find related sites to help with you link building efforts as it is a clear indicator of the importance of using keywords in your titles. This is very useful when you are searching for a specific or specialised product and know exactly what you want, such as the example given below.


Phonebook:name – this is a new command and can bring up a list of phone numbers for people with that name who you search for. You might be a little shocked by the amount of information so readily available! Although only currently available for US numbers this could be a useful tool for getting in touch with people of interest, for example bloggers or online experts.

Type of document: You can also search for documents on Google, and one of the newest operators that they have introduced enables you to search for document by type – search term:document/presentation.spreadsheet etc. A great way to cut down you time spent researching and finding the content that you want.


With more and more people adapting their searches as the internet becomes overloaded with an increasing amount of information it seems that these advanced search operators may be the way forward, not only for industry professionals but also for simple searches. And if you’ve got any more that you find useful we would love to hear about them.