Small business owners will have heard all the rave and buzz about Twitter, and how this microblogging site can help enhance their respective brands. But if you’re not particularly adept at social media, you might be hesitant to dedicate your time and spend all your efforts on something you’re unsure of. Don’t worry; it’s perfectly natural. It is indeed difficult to cut through all the noise and find out what exactly you’re getting from Twitter. How does it help your brand? What are people saying about it? In what ways can you manage the so-called “Twitter sentiment” when you don’t even know what that sentiment is? Below you’ll find a list of Twitter tools to help bring you closer to the answers you’re looking for. These are tools for tracking Twitter sentiment – or how people perceive your brand – in the popular social media site. Twitter Search: It goes without saying that the volume of Tweets that the world – Read the full article
Last week we published a guide on how to monitor Google Places reviews, Web updates, and content changes. It was well-received by our readers, so we’d like to build on the post and share info this time on tools for online reviews monitoring and management. Hopefully, this list will help you track online reviews of your brand, product, establishment, service, or business – and enhance your reputation as more customers talk about you on Google Places, Yelp, online directories, local business listings, and social media sites. Or, if you’ve used any of the online reputation management tools below, do let us know by leaving a comment below and sharing with us your experience. ReviewPush Texas-based ReviewPush markets itself as an “online review management tool for small to large businesses”. It offers a dashboard for monitoring / tracking reviews, protecting your brand and reputation, engaging with customers, and enhancing product offerings and promotions (such as coupons). ReviewPush features include: Continuous social – Read the full article
It’s not uncommon for businesses today to use social networks – namely, Twitter and Facebook – as a platform for engaging with customers and managing customer relationships. This development has given rise to an increasing number of social media solutions and dashboards, each promising to streamline all tasks and bring a new level of ease in customer engagement. Let’s take a look at the best of these solutions and their features. MediaFunnel MediaFunnel is a social media suite for businesses and enterprises, with a host of features designed to make Twitter and Facebook accounts easier to manage. One of these distinguishing features is Multiple User Roles, or the ability to assign Administrator, Publisher, and Contributor roles and grant various levels of permission to review or publish tweets and Facebook posts (for greater editorial control and efficiency). Apart from monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions and tracking the performance of links via Bit.ly and BudURL, MediaFunnel also enables you to – Read the full article
As the digital marketing and tech world become more important to businesses, trends and tools are constantly being developed in an effort to make life easier for both employees and customers alike. Overall, analytics is swinging towards improvement for the user experience, bringing tools that aim to make management and analysis easier for organizations. The user experience trend has grown by leaps and bounds recently as businesses aim to give their customers a better experience. With the increase in the presence of social media, businesses have also been able to make the gap between buyer and seller. Because so many companies are just now starting to value social media as a major marketing tool, they are also experiencing other types of analytics and marketing tools for the first time. The presence of social media in companies’ marketing plans has pushed the value of a good connection between users and the company. The analytics of social media have really started to – Read the full article
Paid search is a wonderful advertising platform because it gives you clear-cut analytics for ROI decisions. Twitter, on the other hand, is a wonderful advertising platform because it is still natural and fun. Both paid search and Twitter advertising differ in scope and functional use in the marketing mix; however, Twitter recently announced a tool called the “Follower Dashboard”, which, in conjunction with geo-targeted ads, makes Twitter a very attractive advertising medium. Twitter announced the ability for companies to pay for “Promoted Tweets” earlier in 2010, where Coca-Cola garnered 86 million impressions with a single promoted tweet. Holy! Okay, sure Coca-Cola probably paid out the “Wah-Zoo” for that tweet, but even if they paid half a million dollars (ex: cost-per-engagement, or CPE, at $.10 & $6.06 per 1,000 impressions) for that promoted tweet, it would still be competitive with a paid search of $10 CPA. Okay, Twitter is great, we know. But up until now it was only great for – Read the full article
When creating your first blog, you probably dream about having an engaged fan base that would check your site every day, waiting impatiently to read your valuable opinions or thoughts. If you were like most new bloggers, you were more than a little disappointed when barely anyone left a comment and your traffic statistics left a lot to be desired. If you still haven’t found a great way to promote your blog, try one or more of these techniques to drive traffic to your site: Blog Everyday – or Almost Everyday Google and the other search engines love fresh content. The more often you post, the higher your rankings will go. If you apply a little keyword strategy, you’ll soon soar to the top of the search page! Fresh content also keeps your fans coming back for more. If they like what they read, they’ll tune back in for the next edition. If they become disappointed by how long it – Read the full article
A number of business owners and brand managers use Twitter as a tool for communicating advertising and marketing messages, but the popular social media and microblogging site is also an equally powerful public relations tool. Twitter is especially effective in helping you manage your online reputation and plan your crisis communications strategy. Where before, one turned to PR firms in times of crisis and controversy, sticking to traditional media is no longer enough today. Why? Because: People are making and engaging in conversations 24/7, real-time, on social media networks. People are sharing information and opinion through the Internet now more than ever. Dissatisfied customers (or employees), competitors, and unscrupulous stealth marketers can spread false information or commit brand identity theft as easily as they can push their own agendas. So here Twitter comes to save the day! In cases of crisis that can potentially significantly damage your business or brand, you can leverage this tool to respond, interact, and manage – Read the full article
About a year back we compiled a list of competitive intelligence tools and it turned out to be one of our most popular posts. Well its a new year now and we thought you deserved an updated list. We went through the old list and threw out a few services that are no longer useful and added a whole bunch of new ones for you to check out. Some of the sites are more convenient than others depending on your needs. Some are free and some our expensive. Some of them directly monitor competitors’ advertising efforts while others track social media channels. Some of them offer several services and others only one or two. Heck, some of them aren’t even meant to be competitive intelligence tools, but we think each has something beneficial to offer. It was by pure coincidence that it came out to be an even 40 tools so let us know if there’s more we need to – Read the full article
