Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

We’ve learned that the first step in social media marketing is listening and while there are many social listening platforms there is one you can use right now that will give you all sorts of useful information about where your brand is being mentioned right now. This tool is called Social Mention and it helps you track conversations, mentions in just about every social channel. What this means is it lets you see where you might have an audience, what they’re talking about and then engage them.

Suppose you want to know where you brand is being mentioned online across different channels (who doesn’t?), you go to Social Mention and type in your brand name and hit search. For example I did a search for hot-shot location based service Foursquare, in the results page you get mentions for  ‘foursquare’ across different categories such as blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, Q&A and networks.

You can also search for keywords related to your business such as ‘________’ and it will give results where that appears across social channels, you can then go that individual channel and engage in that conversation.

Another bonus is that similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention also has “social media alerts” which will provide daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest about you.

There are other tools just like this one that give you more specific data but come at a cost, for example Radian6, but with Social Mention you can get started right away at no cost.

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This is post is written for people and businesses who are just getting introduced to Twitter and are looking for a more powerful Twitter app to satisfy their real-time needs!

This is a question we get asked all the time and an important one when defining what tools to use to support your social media strategy.

For me it’s Tweetdeck.

I used to use Twhirl and then Seesmic Desktop for about a year or so but Tweetdeck won me over with it’s ability to let you create groups of people to follow. If I had to pick a few things that make me use Tweetdeck everyday here they are:

1. Multiple account management. I have two accounts, @jorgebarba and @blumaya so I see both of them on Tweetdeck without having to go to each one’s Twitter account. This really comes in handy when monitoring various Twitter accounts if your company has them.

2. Easily filter down to the information you want to see. Tweetdeck also let’s you add columns for individual searches. For example a topic I follow is innovation so I added a column that shows tweets of people who us #innovation hashtag in their tweet. 

So once you’ve determined what topics you’ll be monitoring for your social media strategy, you can plug them into Tweetdeck and voila’ you a real-time dashboard! This makes it really easy to filter through information and makes it a little less overwhelming.

3. All in one Twitter functionality. With Tweetdeck you can easily Reply, ReTweet, DM, favorite, email, translate, follow, unfollow, add to list, view profiles directly from the user interface.

4. Ability to view videos and pictures on Tweetdeck. You can also view YouTube videos, Twitpic photos directly on Tweetdeck without having to browse to YouTube or Twitpic which is a big time saver!

5. Ease of use. Seesmic has most of the functionalities that Tweetdeck does but I consider it to be less easy to use than Tweetdeck.

One caveat about Tweetdeck is that it’s a memory hog, over 100 MB and sometimes goes over 200 MB on a Windows 7 machine. So if you don’t have a fast computer with a lot of memory (at least 4 GB of RAM) I recommend you try Seesmic Web which is a web based version of Seesmic Desktop and a great alternative to Tweetdeck.

So there you go, let me know if you get too overwhelmed

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