People are talking about your brand on the web. Given wine is such a natural part of our conversations, you’re sure to see comments posted on wines being opened with friends, wines with faults and inevitably your brand will come up at some time as part of the discussion. So with the tens of thousands of conversations happening online, how does a winery or SME with limited resources track their brand mentions and respond accordingly?
While there are comprehensive (and expensive) analytics packages available for many wine producers these are usually outside of the scope of your marketing budget and in many cases are un-necessary. In most instances, all we really need to know is who is talking about us and what they are saying, so we can respond accordingly.
Luckily there are many free and simple tools to do just that.
Here’s a guide of some of our favourites:
This tool is a must for any brand monitoring, as the set-and-forget alerts are an easy way to stay up to date with new web content. Once created an automated system sends regular email updates of Google results that match the search term.
The only real limitation is your ability to manage the emails, as the system allows creation of up to 1,000 alerts. Depending on what your searching for results can often contain irrelevant information but as a free tool it’s worth wading through each day to see what is being discussed.
If you’re on twitter, the easiest place to start is with a twitter management program like TweetDeck or HootSuite. Simply set up a search on your brand name (in addition to mentions of your twitter handle) and run the column continuously in the background. Any mention of your product appears in real-time.
These results are limited to real-time only, Tweetdeck shows the most recent 100 tweets, so there is no chance to back search. To capture all comments you will need to look at other programs. Hootsuite has just added some new reporting functionality that helps with analytics added to your profile and shows more sentiment changes on your brand. Worth checking out and finding your favourite platform.
This search component of Twitter will retrieve all mentions on a search going back seven days, up to 1500 tweets. You can search for a url, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag and there are advanced search options such as combining or excluding terms or limiting sources.
The best part of Twitter Search is that it allows you to restrict a search to geographical areas, near a city or country and within a given radius. You can segment the conversation, for example, to Australian or UK originated tweets only.
There’s also a great post on Ragan.com about useful ways to search twitter that can be found here.
Like Twitter Search, TweetReach retrieves tweets going back five to seven days. It lets you do everything Search Twitter does, except for the geographic limits. However it also gives basic analytics like exposure (number of impressions) and most influential contributors.
The free version only lists the last 50 tweets so a brand with a reasonable level of activity will need to be checked more often than every five days or alternatively sign up for some of the paid reports that removes the 50 tweet restriction.
Kurrently’s power comes in including both Twitter and Facebook comments in searches to give a more comprehensive picture of social conversations. This is a particularly useful feature in Australia where Facebook usage dominates over Twitter. For added convenience side bar links also allow searches of Google and YouTube.
Social Mention searches across the entire web taking in 100+ social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Flickr. It also reports on analytics including strength, sentiment, passion and reach.
The volume of information can be overwhelming so well refined search terms are essential. And while older results can be patchy, especially for microblogs, the sheer reach it provides is definitely worth a look.
Analyses activity and reports on a daily basis on the blogosphere. You can keep informed on key phrases, key people and monitor conversations based on topics of choice.
Refining the Search Terms
As with all searches the results are only as good as the search terms. Most of these tools offer advanced search options to help narrow the field but finding the best terms does take some playing around. Most importantly look out for how consumers regularly refer to your brand (do they use the full name, include the word ‘wine’ or shorten the name) as those are probably the conversations you are most interested in finding. Also worth thinking about whether your brand name is often spelt incorrectly and setting up a mention of that too. You’d be surprised how much you can pick up this way.
While none of these free tools offer a complete picture of the conversations around your brand they do give a useful overview, and provide a starting point to enter the conversation. And, really, that is all most brands need. The downside is that many of the free tools are on a specific social media platform so if you’re looking for a combined report across all sites or more analytics to show to a board or stakeholders on the change in sentiment of the brand, some of the paid services are where you’ll start seeing real benefits.
These are just a selection of the tools, and many more out there and new ones constantly being released. Check out sites like addictomatic.com, Backtype Alerts, Alltop for a few other tools we like. Remember, these tools are most useful if they are part of an integrated communications strategy and can take up a lot of time unless you think about what you are wanting to monitor and for what purpose. For many brands listening is just the first step on the social media journey.
If there’s other tools you use that others would find useful, love to hear about them in the comments section below.
