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.
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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?