Monitor what people are saying about your business online

Do you know what your customers or the media are saying about your business online? Google Alerts are a great way of monitoring the web for mentions of your brand, company or products. You get alerts via email direct to your inbox. It’s a free tool and easy to sign-up and add alerts.

You can sign up here: Google Alerts. If you already have a google/gmail account you can just use that username and password, if not it’s easy and free to set-up one. You can be alerted about any keyword e.g. you brand name, by just typing it in the box. You can add up to 1000 alerts.

Google alerts uses google search syntax to narrow your search. Some simple examples below:

Using “

When you put a word or phrase in quotes, the results will only include pages with the same words in the same order as the ones inside the quotes. Only use this if you’re looking for an exact word or phrase, otherwise you’ll exclude many helpful results by mistake.
Example: "inc60 business explorers"

Using –

When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.
Examples: jaguar speed -car

You can find details information about google search operators.

There are many other software tools available that do similar jobs to google alerts, some with more insights especially with regard to Social Media mentions. This is not an exhaustive list but just a few we came across when exploring the web:

Mention

With Mention’s ability to monitor billions of sources in over 40 languages, you won’t miss anything being said about what’s important to you. And since mentions are in real time, you’ll be able to reply right away within Mention

Social Mention

Real-time social media search and analysis

Talkwalker Alerts

Monitor the Web for interesting new content about your name, brand, competitors, events or any favourite topic with Talkwalker Alerts! Talkwalker Alerts are an easy and free alerting service that provides email updates of the latest relevant mentions on the Web directly to your email box or RSS feed reader.