The Essential FREE Social Media

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!

about Good Talent Attraction Is Crucial

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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Andy Headworth I work with companies to help them improve their recruitment strategies, recruitment processes, candidate attraction, employer branding and recruitment content marketing strategy. I am currently writing my second book, Social Media Recruitment, which will be published early in 2015.

Comments 10 - The Essential FREE Social Media

Jon

June 20, 2012 • Reply

thanks for this - really useful - haven’t heard of a few of these before
Louise Triance

June 20, 2012 • Reply

Fab article and advice - as usual Andy!
Andy Beal

June 20, 2012 • Reply

Thanks for sharing Trackur with your readers. And thanks for the fish-slapping visual.

I totally agree that monitoring is not just about putting out fires.

All the best!
Saul

July 21, 2012 • Reply

Great stuff, and may I suggest that anyone looking to hone in on conversations, curate content and/or topic-tag for reach needs to use the brand new social media tool, for brand monitoring, listening, topic smart-tagging, and content curation (with proper referencing of original content creators): RiteTag is a tool for finding the “rite” tags for many social networks based on your query. We also provide stats and examples of recent updates with each tag suggested, so people can learn about the types of content that tends to go with a tag.

Some tools do tag illustration. Also, they do the job just with Twitter; https://www.RiteTag.com already has 10 social neworks (with topic-tagging) integrated, and will expand to more than 20 - which people can search on simultaneously. RiteTag - to find the rite tags, per network (they vary per network) and learn about tags as well. Its not about SEO, but SSO: social sharing optimization: optimizing social media updates to be seen by those not following you by name, but following and searching for your tagged topics. And absolutely nothing out there does what RiteTag.com does for this, not for one network, let alone the ten that we already have integrated.
Walter

July 23, 2012 • Reply

I like TwitterWatch for Chrome and Firefox a lot. It monitors up to 5 keywords and displays the number of hits while you work in your browser. No need to log into a dedicated social media monitoring tool. Very handy.
Andy Headworth

July 25, 2012 • Reply

Saul,

Thank you for sharing this product - it is a great idea. Again sounds like a simple product (no doubt underpinned by some complex algorithms!)

I have applied for the beta, so will give more of an opinion when I have had a play with it further.
Andy Headworth

July 25, 2012 • Reply

Walter,

Thanks for sharing that - not come across Twitterwatch before and as a Chrome user, I do like plug-ins so I will have a look.
Martin Kang

October 9, 2012 • Reply

Please also consider including SocialMotus. We’re a new, free social management tool platform for businesses and individuals. We’re building some innovative and powerful conversion tracking and social management features including priority messages inbox, targeted Twitter followers discovery, sales conversions by posts and much more.

You can review it by signing up for free here https://www.socialmotus.com or emailing me for more information.
Pia Sen

November 22, 2012 • Reply

Hi,
A Good ARTICLE for all Social Media Enthusiasts indeed
Success of social media engagement efforts in a business depends upon the means we monitor them. Moreover social media analytics platform helps organizations to use the power of social networking sites to understand, monitor, verify and respond to customer preferences and feedback.
We have been writing Blogs on current matters of similar concerns
link to goo.gl
Expecting you to share your views with us and please do keep on posting
Thanks and regards
Pia Sen
Andy Headworth

November 23, 2012 • Reply

Thanks Pia, I will check your blog out!

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