There is no need to keep harping the fact that monitoring your social media presence is an unavaoidable part of your social media marketing strategy since it is widely acknowledged and accepted. The more burning question is how to go about doing it and how much does it cost to do it effectively. While I always believe that there is value to be had if you’re willing to pay, there are plenty of tools and resources out there which can be used to efficiently monitor your online presence in general and social media in particular for free. And who doesn’t like that cost, right?
Here are some of the easy ways to get started.

Feed on the Feeds - Instead of going to umpteen places to check content that is relevant and that you want to monitor, subscribe to those sources so that the information that you’re looking for is delivered to you as and when they’re available. The simplest and easiest form of Feed to subscribe is the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and the option to subscribe to an RSS is found on most content sites – News, Alerts, Blogs, Discussions etc. You can even track articles and discussion on the same on your page in Wikipedia using an RSS feed.

Next step is to bring all these resources to a single place for easy use and reference. Though there are are a lot of aggregator services available, the easiest place to work with is the Google Reader which comes with an easy user interface. It is way better than being getting your mailbox loaded with all the subscriptions which makes housekeeping a bit of a headache and since it is attached to your Google account it’s all in one place with a single sign-on.

Twitter - A lot of companies do real time monitoring of tweets related to their products and services so that they’re equipped to handle customer service in much shorter time spans. And the fact that tweets are indexed by search engines and also the viral nature of the medium causing word of mouth to be spread far and wide pretty quick makes monitoring them a worthwhile activity. Twitter search comes with the subscription feature where you can get the feed of the search query which delivers all tweets relevant to those searches to you.


Facebook - Monitoring your social media presence follows creating one and there is no point arguing against the need to have a Facebook page since every business worth its salt is present there. Who wouldn’t want be present in a half billion community right? The Insights feature on your Facebook page gives you valuable statistics about your page’s visitors which helps you to review and tweak the content as required. Gladly, Facebook pages are indexed by Search engines as well.

The above is more than enough to kick start your online media monitoring initiative.