“How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day”

Portions excerpted from the HotSpot Blog

Monitoring your social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to people talking about our brand and understand how people view our company. However, a common concern is that it takes up too much time. It is entirely possible for one person to keep an eye on things. If you set up a solid routine, monitoring your online presence doesn't have to be a hassle at all.
 
Here are five easy steps you can take to get things started. Do each task in the morning when you start work, and you should be good to go.

1. Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. To check once a day, set up an RSS feed for a specific Twitter Search to go straight to your Google Reader. Do this by clicking the little RSS icon after you complete a search. Now, ongoing search results will be sent to your reader.

2. Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check your Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3. Check LinkedIn Contact Info (1 minute): Visit your contacts and check your targeted companies/accounts to scan any updated personnel changes; focus areas; and/or networking events that they have registered to participate in; and don’t forget to check the Groups” that are associated with to see if they have any related comments or questions about specific issues that could affect their decision making.

4. Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website. If you are a member of any groups, check also to see if any new discussions started and if you can add value by promoting our solutions or gain additional customer information.

5. Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others (2.5 minutes): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!