If you’re reading this article then you no doubt are aware about the power of social media and are perhaps even engaging in some type of social media marketing (SMM) for your business or work. The explosion of different social media platforms over the past few years has created a great environment for people to talk liberally about their interests, including perhaps your brand or business. Of course when people are talking about you, having your ear to the wall can prove worthwhile for several important reasons and in this context is rarely frowned upon. Some reasons for monitoring your social media efforts may seem more obvious than others but they all basically boil down to measuring the return on your investment in this area and how you can improve on it. Sounds simple, but don’t be fooled. Some of these reasons may actually encompass managing your reputation, gaining an insight into customer preferences, measuring market response, research, tracking competitors, tracking product launches, tracking industry trends and damage control, to name a few. Monitoring social media can be straight forward for some businesses but it can also be quite an involved task. Either way, social media monitoring has to be conducted with a proactive, reactive and ongoing approach in mind.

People are talking about your business. Are you listening?

There are many ways to monitor what is being said about your brand through social media platforms. Some techniques can involve the use of elaborate commercial tools while other simple and free methods may also suffice. It really depends on the scale of your social media efforts and brand exposure as to which approach to monitoring is best for you. Below is a list of some of the tools and techniques that you may find helpful in tailoring your own monitoring strategy. Keep in mind that this basic list is purely an introduction to some methods that should be used in-line with an overall strategy for monitoring your defined measurables, no matter how comprehensive they may be.

Freebie tools and options:

• Google alerts are email alert updates from latest relevant Google search results for web, blog and news based on your choice of keywords, or topics. You can choose to receive alerts daily, weekly, or as it happens.
• Facebook insights does exactly what it says. This free tool is a great way to get an insight into your Facebook fan page. Not only does it give you useful statistics on your fan base but it also provides reports and information on how your fans are interacting with your page and what they are saying.
• Twitter search allows you to search keywords or hash tags in real-time and get a live feed of status updates related to your brand or topics of interest. Using the advanced options means you can really target your query by things like location, people, dates and even attitudes.
• Hootsuite is a Twitter client similar to that of TweetDeck. Besides doing all that you would expect from a great Twitter client, Hootsuite has some great features that let you monitor your brand and other searches as well as letting you tract statistics.
• How Sociable and Back Type are both similar tools that provide a quick and easy way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. Simply plug your brand or topic into the search and view what’s being said in a useful report. These options are somewhat limited to larger and better known brands and topics but are becoming increasingly more capable of delivering broader results.
• Co.mments helps you stay on top of online conversations by keeping you updated of new comments. It lets you bookmark multiple posts that you can track and contribute to through one easy interface. You can also subscribe to your tracking feed and read new comments in your feed reader or e-mail client.

Out of pocket solutions:

• Trackur is one of many all-inclusive online reputation & social media monitoring tools designed to assist you in tracking specifically what is being said about you online. Using sophisticated social media monitoring and filtering technology, Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums, discovering anything that matches the keywords that interest you.
• Radian6 is another full featured tool that has a flexible dashboard that enables monitoring all kinds of social media with real-time results. Some key features include the ability to identify influences and opportunities, measure engagement and determine which conversations are having an impact online.
• Social Cast is another ‘off the shelf’ enterprise collaboration tool. It performs similar to others in this list but has a great level of integration across a variety of platforms including mobile and email.
• Brand Watch is yet another collaboration tool. It features multi-language support and a very powerful custom crawler that returns very useful information that can be presented in a variety of in-depth and beautifully presented reports.
• Social Text, like the collaboration tools above, incorporates micro-blogging, wiki workspaces, blogs, groups and social networking to improve and enable enterprise collaboration. It does have some paid and some free versions of its tools.
• Nielson Online boasts an innovative suite of Internet media and market research products to help brands measure and respond to online consumers, audiences, advertising, video, e-commerce and consumer behaviour.

So there we are. Hopefully some of these tools may become useful for those of you who can feel their ears burning. After all, having your ear to the wall has never been more tempting.