A big welcome to Red Slice summer intern Suzi An, the author of this guest blog post.
Once a brand has been established, it’s easy to forget the importance of monitoring its impact. How do you know if it’s “working” or if the right buyers are responding unless you immediately see a sales jump (not likely to happen immediately). Many business owners and entrepreneurs develop a brand and expect it to work it’s magic. This is true to a certain extent, but it takes much more than just a logo to build a reputable status. This is why it’s important to monitor your brand so that you may see how people perceive it in addition to their reactions. This will give you the means to tweak the necessarily elements in order to create the brand that matches your identity.
There are many tools out there that can be used to observe who is talking about your brand and the exciting thing is that you have the option to monitor your reputation for free. Here a few free tools that are user friendly and can be customized to your liking.
1. GOOGLE ALERTS: The most popular as well as accessible tool that is buzzing around is Google Alerts. This tool sends you email updates daily, weekly, or on a real-time basis on the latest topics of your choice, or your brand name. You can even customize where you want Google to search for your name such as blogs, articles, videos, etc.
2. TWEETBEEP: Tweetbeep uses Twitter to email you updates every time someone Tweets about your keywords. The great thing about this tool is that you can set alerts up for what people are saying about your competitors in addition to your industry sector.
3. BLOGPULSE TREND SEARCH: This tool allows you to create graphs based on buzz trends for your keywords or phrases. BlogPulse gives you a visual on how your brand is doing online and you can easily compare and contrast results to your liking.
4. BRAND MENTIONS: This social media listening tool forages around user-generated content, which includes comments, blogs, events and tracks mentions of your keywords throughout these areas. Brand Mentions searches through Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, etc and emails you results. You may also choose to subscribe by RSS.
Though this is a relatively short list, there are more than hundreds of tools on the Internet whose soul purpose is to help businesses and entrepreneurs alike in securing their brand. Use these tools to your advantage, meaning collect your data, analyze, and take your next step in making your brand beyond everyone’s expectations.
This is a guest post from our new Red Slice intern, Suzi An.
