Good morning all you savvy socialites! Just about everyone, including Tiger Woods who recently resurrected his Twitter account, has learned that applying a strong channel of open messages with the public is the key to communication success. Since half of a conversation is speaking and the other half is listening, we believe that in order to effectively communicate with others we must put on our listening ears and pay attention to what is being said.
Here are five tips that have worked for us that could work for you too:
1. Trendistic: Track Twitter trends with this nifty little tool called, Trendistic. Trendistic gathers posted tweets and filters them into one-hour intervals. You can log onto the website to check out topics that are of interest to you, for instance, your business or check out the most popular tweets of the hour. This tool is helpful when tracking an event, product or company as it categorizes trends in an ever-changing conversation.
2. Technorati: Have you thought about searching real-time blog popularity indexes? If not, we have! Technorati can help you explore the world of blogosphere. This blog search engine can help whenever you type any topic into its search bar. Sounds simple enough, right? After typing in your chosen topic, Technorati will show you real-time blogs that are being addressed about your particular topic.
3. Compete: Keep your friends close and your competition closer with Compete. This one-stop-shop provides many measurement tools to follow almost every website. Have you ever wondered how you compare with similar businesses in your industry? View the monthly traffic numbers of up to five different websites to determine your growth or decline in the past three, six or 12 months. Compete is also a good way to determine the potential reach of your story after your business receives online coverage.
4. BoardTracker: This search engine offers you results from over two billion live discussion forums and messages boards, hence the name, BoardTracker. Since consumers tend to not hold back when writing on discussion forums, this search engine is ideal when you are in need of honest results about a product, company or person.
5. Social Mention: It’s similar to Google Alerts…but better! Social Mention helps all you social media fanatics receive free daily email alerts from your favorite company, competitor or celebrity. All you have to do is provide a keyword for Social Mention to track and choose which type of medium you prefer. Whether you favor blogs, bookmarks, comments, audio or videos, Social Mention will present the results to you in one daily stream.
We hope you’ll be able to use some of these online tools to aid in your open communication with the world and be on the listen! Good luck!