6 Tools To Monitor Your Brand

If you’re a company trying to succeed, staying in touch with the community is of utmost importance. You must be responsive to your customers and users. You must be on the look out for opportunities to promote your product or service to those who obviously need it. You should be on top of any complaints or negative comments that arise. Even if someone is bad-mouthing your brand, a simple reply will usually change their mind simply because they know you are listening.

Many business owners in the black community have no problem staying on their hustle, but I think many of us are forgetting that that same hustle needs to extend into new media and social networking. This is especially true if your running an online service. You think just handing out business cards and going to networking events is going to make people visit your website and use your product?

Here are a few ways to stay in touch with the community and monitor your brand.

Backtweets and Backtype

Given a link to your site or a specific post on your blog, Backtweets will show you who has mentioned you on Twitter. There is even a bookmarklet that will make it simple to get tweets about any link on-the-fly.

If you want to take this to the next level, you’ll want to use Backtype Connect, which we wrote about here. This will not only give you the tweets about a specific link, but will show you all the comments from various social media services that pertain to that link. Grab the bookmarklet to make checking links easier.

Tweetbeep and Twilert

Tweetbeep and Twilert will monitor Twitter and email you any mentions of keywords you choose. This helps you to monitor Twitter mentions without actually being on the service 24/7. This way, you can respond at your leisure if necessary.

SM2 and Filtrbox

If you’re looking for a comprehensive brand-monitoring solution for your business, you’ll probably want to try Radian6, Filtrbox, and/or SM2. These provide much more advanced statistics about your keywords and mentions. Filtrbox and SM2 have freemium accounts available, so I would recommend trying both. I haven’t actually used Radian6, but it’s the real deal from what I’ve heard.

How do you monitor your reputation? Do you feel that black businesses do a good job of keeping in touch with you on the internet? Which ones specifically?