Total privacy becomes a thing of the past the moment you venture onto the internet. And if you’re in business today you must have a presence on the internet.
Some of my business owner clients express concern at the potential security issues and invasion of privacy caused by using the social networks. My advice to them is to be selective as to what personal details they share online, and easy to set up monitoring systems to be aware of what is being said about them.
The following is from my Social Media Mentoring programme:
Twitter Mentions
If you use HootSuite.com (aff) the dashboard can easily be organised to track @ mentions, retweets of your tweets, and trending # topics. And for when you’re too busy to keep an eye on the live Twitter stream, if you use Twilert, you won’t miss any mentions of your selected tweets. This delivers daily emails listing all the tweets that mention your Twitter Name, and you can request alerts for product names, terms, or #topic being discussed in tweets.
Facebook Monitoring
Monitoring activity on Facebook is important if your target market or clients are there. Facebook has a very efficient notification system, for your personal profile and business Pages, with plenty of preference options you can tweak.
Another very useful and reliable Facebook Page monitoring tool is Hyper Alerts. You can set as many alerts for as many Pages as you choose. The main difference between this and Facebook’s own notifications is that you don’t need to be an Admin. of the page in order to set up the alert.
LinkedIn Notifications
Within the Settings option, there are various options to keep track of who can contact you and how often you want to receive notifications. You can use the Profile Stats to see who has visited your profile, but it does depend on how those visitors have configured their own settings.
Monitoring Discussions in Groups will keep you up to date with member activity and responses to your own contributions. If you belong to a lot of busy Groups, you can tailor the settings to limit the frequency of email notifications.
Google Alerts
By far the most powerful online reputation monitoring tool is Google Alerts. It monitors just about anything and everything on the web: including web pages, blog posts and newspaper articles posted online.
What to monitor: To use it effectively, set up Alerts for Your name, your business name and any product names you want to monitor.
How to be notified: You can either choose to be notified by RSS feed (if you have a Google Account) or specify an email address.
How often to be notified: The default is for alerts to be sent to you once a day, but you can also choose from once a week or ‘as it happens’ for each alert you set up.
It can take a few attempts to get exactly the results you want in an alert and Google’s website has more tips on how to refine your alerts.
If you’re building your personal or small business brand online, then it makes sense to keep a check on what’s being said about you and your business, as well as any product or service names for which you own the trademark.
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