Any business, be it large or small, is established while keeping its customers (or audience) in mind. And a marketing strategy is built upon the customers’ needs, and adjustments are made according to the feedback received. Hence, it is extremely important for businesses, especially startups, to heed their customers, and get an insight into what they think or do about products. In the online world, this is called buzz, which is mostly generated through referrals, or word of mouth. So how can a business owner monitor the talk about his business? Here are some tools that could help.
1. HootSuite
HootSuite is THE social media dashboard. It isn’t site specific, meaning it doesn’t work with just Facebook or Twitter. You can manage most social media profiles from one single place, and use features such as auto publish, mass update, scheduled feeds etc. The full functionality isn’t free, however, which is perhaps the biggest drawback of this awesome tool.
2. TweetDeck
Now if you’ve any knowledge about Internet Marketing, you’ll know how important a social network Twitter is. TweetDeck is a Twitter Dashboard where you can create filters and arrange feeds to learn about a topic in detail. Additionally, you can schedule your Tweets ahead of time. Furthermore, it allows you to generate reports on keywords, and mentions etc. It’s free, and easy to use too!
3. Beevolve
This is another good social media dashboard. But it also offers search engine marketing. It will even do word-of-mouth marketing, so while monitoring your audience and buzz, you’ll see it go up! Prices are a bit steep @ $49.95 per month, but it isn’t that much if you think of it as an investment!
4. Google Alerts
This tool is specialized for monitoring mentions, so you can respond to them asap. Occasionally, your site might get a mention on a service such as Google News. Google Alerts will let you know about it so you can respond appropriately. And the best part, it’s free!
5. Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is a great, and very popular service you can use to search information. There are multiple filters, or ‘pipes’ in their interface which you can combine to produce a refined feed for your search. It is free to use too!
6. NetVibes
An all-in-one social media and marketing tool providing analytics, customer engagement tools, buzz monitoring, and more. The price is steep, but so is the features list!
7. Spy
Spy is a useful little tool that monitors social media conversations from all over the web, reading from services such as Flickr, Google Readeer, Twitter, blogs etc. So in short, it’s a search engine and you can use it for free!
8. ReputeMe
This is a complete business management tool that’ll let you manage all your social media profiles, track your competitors, manage you contacts, and more. It’s a premium tool.
9. Buzzient
Buzzient is a whole new buzz generation and monitoring tool. It focuses on using social media for interacting with customers, and offers social media integration for your site. Besides, it has a dashboard for social media.
10. The Moment Brand Monitor
This tool monitors your business’ progress and displays increasing or decreasing trends on a monthly 2-point graph. Along with that, there’s a dashboard with many tools to help you better engage your customers.
That was all for now. If you know of any better tools, then do let us know! Also, tell us what you think about these tools. Cheers 🙂
Good post. The success full business persons monitor every day their business details.Monitoring is vary important to achieve success.These tools are helps me a lot for monitor my business and my competitor business.