Twitip

By Nathan Hangen of Making It Social. Follow him @nhangen.

If you don’t know what you are doing, measuring your brand online is like sticking a finger in the air and trying to gauge the direction of the wind. It just isn’t as easy as it looks. However, once you understand the tools required to make it happen, brand monitoring becomes 2nd nature. The trick then, is knowing what to monitor and how to do it.

In the past, people relied on Google alerts to send notifications of brand mentions, which usually came in the form of links. Although this is a great way to measure trackbacks and general sentiment, I don’t feel that it offers a complete picture. Not only that, but the results are delayed, meaning that if you get trashed on a forum or in a blog post, then you won’t be able to react until it’s too late. This is why Twitter is changing the way the game is played.

With Twitter, you can track your brand mentions in real time, using a variety of excellent tools. You can track via keyword or hashtag along with the standard mention/RT tracking on the homepage. If you have Twitter integrated onto your blog, then you can add even more firepower to your arsenal by using Tweetbacks and RT’s as comments, which might flesh out an otherwise empty post footer.

The beauty of Twitter tracking tools is that they tell a much greater story than Google does.
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Get a tour of TweetBeep – a useful service for monitoring what people are saying about you on Twitter – with Sherice Jacob (follow her at @sherice) from iElectrify.

Tweetbeep is a free web-based service that lets you get notified via e-mail whenever someone mentions a word, name or phrase on Twitter. Find out immediately when someone tweets (posts) your name, company, or website address on Twitter, even if they use a URL-shortening service like TinyURL.

Step 1: Signing Up for Tweetbeep

Getting started with Tweetbeep is as easy as filling out a simple form right on the first page of tweetbeep.com. Enter any username you want for the first field – the last one is for your Twitter username.

The first page of Tweetbeep.com lets you
create your account instantly.

Once you’ve pressed the Submit button, you’ll be taken to a page where you can customize just about anything regarding the notification(s) you want to receive.

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