Three things you will need to do before you read this post:
1. Go and buy a big fresh fish from your local supermarket
2. Give it to the person standing next to you
3. Tell them to slap you round the face with it!
This might just bring you to your senses....... Just.
Why am I advocating this extreme behaviour? Because you are obviously not listening to all the great advice out there with regards to monitoring anything and everything that is being said about you and your brand online.
I have had the pleasure of doing social recruiting training with a whole bunch of recruiters over the last few weeks. All were on LinkedIn, most were on Facebook, some were on Twitter, most had other social media profiles that they hadn't bothered with (but had crucially set a profile up).
But I could count the number on one hand that were actually monitoring what people were saying about them or their recruitment companies online and in this social space. Madness!
What I would like to make very clear here, is that social media monitoring is for both positive and negative reasons such as:
- finding and engaging with new candidates
- identifying potential new clients
- tracking competitors
- finding those precious advocates and influencers spreading the word about you and your company
- seeing what people are saying about you therefore allowing you to respond
- identifying problems before they get out of hand
- and of course hunting down those occasional damn trolls intent on being annoying
There are some simple free tools like Google Alerts, SocialMention, Topsy (for Twitter), Trackur , Addictomatic and SocialBro shown below in the graphic below. The great thing is that you can then take the RSS feed of the saved alert for most of these tools and plug it into a widget on iGoogle, giving you a simple personalised social media monitoring dashboard for free!
Now if you still like the idea of going down to the local fish shop and grabbing yourself a fish, then you will probably enjoy watching this!
Are there other free tools that you use? Maybe you just use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck columns to do your tracking?
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