Social Media Monitoring: Automate It

Twitter just released a report saying that there are now 50 million tweets every day (600 tweets per second). With such a substantial volume of people messaging each other it’s good to know that there’s tools out there to help you find, monitor, and automate exactly what you’re interested in. There’s tools that range from simple and easy to use to ones that provide a feature-set that is seemingly endless. So let’s start out covering the tools that everyone can jump in and start using before we go into the more advanced managing and monitoring services.

Seesmic Look (Twitter)

Seesmic Look is the latest Twitter application to be released, and is also one of the most interesting. It’s unique focus on making it obvious to the that the information being received is updated “real-time” helps beginning users grasp the concept of the always connected and always up-to-date websites that have been emerging. In addition to it’s new interface, it provides the ability to easily browse other users and popular topics people are talking about. The most useful feature is its search functionality. You can search for a term and Look will give you a list of “tweets” where the term was mentioned. The search term can be saved and easily monitored throughout the day.

Google Alerts has been around for years, but it’s still greatly valuable. Google has been watching social media sites very closely and has been integrating them into search results. One benefit of including social media sites is you can use a Google Alert to send an email to you whenever a certain term is mentioned on the web. This great because these notifications include every result in Google’s massive search index.

Seesmic Desktop (Twitter & Facebook)

What if you’re active on both Twitter and Facebook and require something more real-time than Google Alerts? Surely you don’t want to use separate applications for each website when there’s Seesmic Desktop. With the integration of both Facebook and Twitter, Seesmic Desktop takes the browsing and searching features of Look and makes them more customizable.The multiple column layout might take some time to get used to, but the ability to monitor multiple social media accounts, saved searches, users, and groups of users at all at once is a great time saver.

There’s also Seesmic Web, a website with similar features & functionality but is lacking facebook support.

HootSuite (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, & more)

HootSuite is one of the most robust social media tool available today, and is a publisher’s best friend. It shares the same column view that Seesmic Desktop uses and includes all of the features that the program has to offer. That’s just the start though, because there’s a pretty large feature list. The way it handles accounts is pretty unique, and very useful. They allow you to add “editors” that can access/update your accounts (you choose which accounts each editor has access to). In terms of posting, you have the ability to schedule a tweet/post/etc. and even have it publish out to multiple accounts at once. You can automate your posts by attaching an RSS feed to an account and choosing the behavior of how it’s going to publish new items. Being a publishing tool, they allow you to take any of the columns you create and embed it on a website as a self-contained widget. An important feature that most tools are lacking is the ability to track referrers,  click throughs, and other statistics for each of your accounts. HootSuite is highly recommended if you’re taking your social media relations seriously, and are willing to spend the time to learn the tool.

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With out using tools, social media and brand monitoring and be a very expensive and time consuming task. These are a few solutions that will help automate the process, save you time, and save your organization money. In terms of tools, there’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking whether you’re a beginner or someone or social media junkie.