22 Social Media Alerts Your Business Should Be Using

by Adam Holden-Bache on Sep 09, 2011 Follow @adamholdenbache

Tweet
Buffer

One of the easiest ways businesses can take advantage of social media is by establishing alerts that cover a wide range of topics. By doing so businesses can quickly monitor any social media activity about their company, industry or competition.

By using free alert tools like Social Mention and Google Alerts (or by using the alert capabilities of your social media monitoring software) you can set up alerts in minutes and have them delivered to your email inbox or RSS reader.

So what should you track? Here’s a list of 22 social media alerts your business should consider:

YOUR COMPANY

1. Company name
2. Company name common variations and misspellings
3. Company domain name(s)
4. Names of products and/or services
5. Names of key employees
6. Links and shortened URL’s
7. Twitter handle of company name(s)
8. Twitter handles of key employees
9. Web site and blog post copy to find if others are stealing your content

INDUSTRY

10. Industry terms/keywords
11. Conferences and events
12. Hash tags
13. News/breaking stories
14. Industry author/blogger/expert names
15. Industry author/blogger/expert Twitter handles

COMPETITION

16. Names of competitive businesses
17. Competitive domain names
19. Your competition’s shortened URL domain
19. Names of competition products and/or services
20. Names of competition key employees
21. Twitter handles of your competition, their products and key employees
22. Events managed by your competition (conferences, webinars, etc.)

BONUS IDEA:

23. Use alerts as idea generators for blog posts

If you end up creating a wide range of alerts, consider setting up ways to organize the notices. Within your email software, creating filters to organize the messages might be necessary to avoid inbox overflow. Using an RSS reader is more manageable, as you can group your alerts into various folders.

—-

For those of you using alerts, do you find them valuable? Do you have any other recommendations for a type of alert businesses should consider?

Brandon Pierce

Very good suggestions. I hadn’t thought to use the Twitter handles as alerts too.
http://www.indiemark.com/ Indiemark

First I’ve heard of Social Mention, good find!
Pingback: Links You May Have Missed This Week
http://twitter.com/beccabernstein Becca Bernstein

I work for a very competitive industry and have all of my competitors tweets sent to my phone. And while there are evenings when I need to keep it on mute, it’s a great way to stay informed with what they’re talking about. Great tips, Adam.
http://www.philb.com/whichse.htm PhilBradley

Unfortunately it looks as though SocialMention may have died. Try Icerocket or surchur instead.
http://www.masstransmit.com/ Adam Q. Holden-Bache

Thanks Becca. I agree that alerts can be overwhelming at times, but am always glad to have access to the info. Personally I use Social Mention for my most important keywords and have those hit my inbox, then use Google Alerts via RSS for everything else. Then I can review those on my own schedule. I might try your approach with phone delivery for tweets/alerts I don’t want to miss- good idea there.
http://www.masstransmit.com/ Adam Q. Holden-Bache

Thanks Scott. Social Mention is a good tool. I’d suggest using it in combo with Google Alerts for your most important keywords- they don’t always deliver the same results, but between the two you’ll cover off on nearly all mentions.
http://www.masstransmit.com/ Adam Q. Holden-Bache

Figures that would happen with the publishing of the post- thanks for the heads up. Seems they are experience some server issues but hopefully will be operational again shortly.
Pingback: Social Media Weekly Roundup | Spark Boutik

Social Fresh