Social Media „Listening“ Tools: Collecta | Social Media Today

Monitoring the social media conversation is a good start, …

There are a few tools you can use to quickly get going, and they’re easy to use:

• Google Alerts – If you manage a brand and aren’t using Google Alerts, start now. It emails you with regular (or as-it-happens) updates when you get mentioned online. It works well for tracking bigger things like blog posts; less so for lively Twitter discussion.
• TweetDeck– One of a number of Twitter clients that pops up notifications for search terms (like the name of your brand). TweetDeck is especially useful if you’re handling several Twitter accounts at once.
• TweetBeep – For if you can’t handle keeping a Twitter client open. It’s basically Google Alerts for Twitter, keeping you posted by email on what’s being said in tweets.
• Kurrently – Searches Twitter and Facebook in real-time, and you can grab an RSS feed of its results.
• Collecta– Attempts to combine all of the above, searching the web, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and others, offering RSS feeds for your search terms.

If your brand is big enough or interesting enough that people are talking about it, then you need to be monitoring the conversation.

Good list of „listening“ tools. My favorite could become Collecta. The approach to cover not only Twitter but more social channels, the ability to create RSS feeds for your favorite social search terms and the possibility to integrate Widgets in a web site look very promising. I will test the tool in the next weeks.

I know, we are in a more and more global world. But what I am still looking for is the possibility to monitor social media on language or country level. E.g. my responsibility is the German market. So I want to monitor the conversation within German blogs, Twtter or Facebook accounts to be able to respond.