[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none”]What are people saying about YOU and your book? Here’s how to find out.[/tweet_box]
If your book has just been published and you’re wondering what people are saying about it on social media, there’s no better way to find out than through social listening. In order to control your personal brand, you’ll simply need to know what’s being said about you and who’s saying it.
Seeing clearly what the general trends in the reception of your book or your personal brand are, you’ll have an idea about responding to your audience. Instead of spending hours browsing through various social channels, you can use smart tools that will collect information from many social networks and present it to you in a digestible form. Here are 7 key tools you should be using for effective social listening.
Social Searcher
This is a great tool to start your adventure with social listening. Just type in a keyword and you’ll be instantly presented with search results covering social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even the web in general. The tool will also indicate the time period of the social activity, giving you an idea how often people talk about a topic. You can set up an email alert for a specific keyword, monitor it over a period of time, export the results to CSV and benefit from an array of practical analytics.
Topsy
This tool focuses on blogs and multimedia. Searching a keyword, you’ll see a complete list of mentions together with some analytics insights – for instance sentiment measurement that shows whether the general attitude towards your keyword verges on positive or negative. Alerts are available for email and are tied to your Twitter or Facebook account. You don’t need to register to use this service.
Icerocket
This tool will be perfect if what you’re after are blog posts in particular. This doesn’t mean that it won’t cover other kinds of online activity – just click on a feature called ‘big buzz’ to see what’s happening on Twitter, Facebook or even a photo-sharing platform Flickr. Icerocket is intuitive to use and you can benefit from its features without registering.
TweetDeck
If you’re an avid fan of Twitter, this tool might be for you. It can help you to manage all your activity on this social network – you can schedule tweets, monitor your messages and interactions, track specific hashtags and manage several accounts at once – especially important if you’re running both personal and professional Twitter profiles.
Social Mention
This is a perfect social listening tool – it has an extremely wide reach and collects information from platforms scattered all around the web. Among the networks covered by Social Mention are the classic giants like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, but also small websites, such as Photobucket. In the analytics section, you’ll see how many of those sources are active and what is the general feeling about your keyword. No registration required.
Klout
This is an interesting tool that is often deemed controversial because it measures something that is essentially very hard to measure – user engagement with a given keyword. All insights are based on Twitter activity – you can see what people are saying about you, and what or who serves as their top influencer. You can work with this tool to improve the engagement rate of your tweets. Some users simply love Klout – have a look at its functionalities and decide for yourself.
Trackur
Another great tool for social monitoring, Trackur will generate results from Google+, Twitter, Facebook and many other sources. Its analytics section is very rich – you’ll gain access to keyword discovery, top trends, automated sentiment analysis and influence scoring.
Social listening is easily the best way to find out what your audience really thinks about you or your work – reading only the opinions of reviewers will never give you a full picture of your brand.
Monique Craig is an Australian blogger and marketing specialist who works for Oneflare, an online marketplace which connects customers with local service providers.
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