How To Set Up A Free Social Monitoring Station

Too many companies fail in social media because they are jumping into conversations and trying to “sell” their services and products instead of creating long term value in a way that make sense. You need to create a foundation of know like and trust before you do anything. This can only be achieved through listening first to your audiences. If you try to sell to early you will hurt your brand and it takes a long time to change a bad first impression. (Sorry for the bad video quality in screen mode).

Listening is vital to your success online as offline

As you can read in this headline I think there is no difference between online and offline, you have two ears and one mouth. But the problem online is that we have ten fingers and we want so badly selling people with our keyboard. So back off from your keyboard and pay attention now. I will show you how to use free tools and create a “light” social monitoring station for you personal brand or company. If you don’t have a Google account you need to set up one, visit Google now.

Google Reader checking your feed

I use Google Reader as a key component in my own free listening station. Google Reader will check your subscribed feeds regularly for new content. A lot of different tools like Twitter Search, Technorati, Google blog search, Social Mention and there is more of them. Those tools makes it possible for you to subscribe to the RSS feed for the performed search.

Social Mention and real simple syndication (RSS)

RSS allows you to track and follow sites and searches in a smooth way. Sites that offer RSS will have an orange icon for that. In this post I will focus on Social Mention; who is a very powerful user generated content search engine. It searches blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, Q&A and networks. You can choose to search all of these content areas, or pick a very narrow choice. When you get the result from the performed search, click the RSS icon and feed this url link into your Google Reader. My Mail program (Mac) can handle RSS feeds so I put in my feed even here.

What do you think? Please let me know if I miss anything!

Related posts:

1. Social Media Marketing & Monitoring 2011 #smm11
2. The only free lunch is in the rat trap
3. Your social media puppy needs your attention