As a PR professional, you already know that social networking and real-time communication have dramatically changed the way you do your job. Your role is no longer focused on simply preparing and pushing information and marketing campaigns to audiences.
The pressure is on to know what is being said about your industry, brand and competitors; align your messages and your teams so that you can plan highly targeted and effective campaigns; and, respond to brand-threatening conversations at a moment’s notice. Your role is also to use the myriad of metrics available to you to adjust your campaigns swiftly if you need to, and measure your results at critical points.
Here are 10 free tools to make managing social PR easier.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts have been around for a while so if you haven’t setup alerts for your name, brand name, industry specific keywords do it now.
AllTop
What to know who the top blogs for a specific category are? AllTop really is a like a huge online magazine rack. All the content is separated into categories where you can find the top sources.
Social Mention
Simply put, Social Mention is Google Alerts on steroids. You can quickly monitor your brand across social channels. It helps you track conversations and mentions relevant to your brand in just about every social channel there is.
Twitter Real Time Search
Want to know what people are talking about instantly? You go to Twitter and search the trending topics. Looking for something more specific? Use Twitter’s search engine and search using hashtags (#) to find what’s being said about that particular topic. You can also create your own hashtag to tag your content with and make it easier for people to find it.
Topsy Analytics
Topsy is a Real Time Search Engine that has the largest index of tweets on the web and just a few weeks ago it released its proprietary analytics tool where you can compare domains, @ mentions and keywords in four different time frames from Twitter. Topsy only measures tweets that have links on them or that have a lot of retweets.
You can use it to compare competitor websites and see which links are the most popular. This gives you an idea of that what they’re focusing on and what they might do later on.
Google Trends & Insights
What to know what people are searching for on Google? Google Insights for search shows you historical data of a keywords performance over time as well breakout searches which might indicate a trends is forming.
Klout / Tweet Level
With the rise of social networks also comes the ubiquity of ‘influencers’ and with millions of people talking on social networks, figuring out who has influence is a challenge. Enter reputation tools like Klout, PeerIndex and Edelman’s TweetLevel. While there isn’t one tool that stands out, you can still use them to get an idea of what type of influence a user has.
Very valuable tools indeed.
Compete / Quantcast
Knowing how much traffic a website secures is important for the marketing mix. There are those who swear by Alexa, but there are better alternatives. Compete is the most well-known but their numbers are only from the U.S. I think Quantcast gets closer to the real numbers, but most sites are not in their index.
BackTweets /BackType
How many people does a person reach on Twitter? BackTweets reveals who interacted with your content on Twitter. There is both a Free and a paid version available. There’s also a WordPress plugin that integrates with your blog comments that shows the number of tweets your post got.
Bit.ly
In order to measure content influence you need a tool that tracks that content. Bit.ly is a URL shortener that helps marketer keep track of how many clicks their content gets.
Did I miss something? What tools do you use?
Related articles
- Tools for Creating a PR 2.0 Influencer List (mnprblog.com)
