You will increase your audience reach and engagement by responding to your friends and followers, but how do you track all your mentions?
Well, the simple way to do it is to turn on notifications for all your social media on your mobile device and set up email notifications. It works fine until people who have just woken up on the other side of the world and reading your stuff start waking you up in the middle of the night because your phone is going nuts.
You won’t be able to respond to every mention in real time so one of the best tools for tracking all your activity is good old Google Alerts, but you need a decent Google ranking to ever turn up on that. So take a look at something like Mention, which is like Google Alerts but better. Carefully select key phrases that you want to monitor (you might use the phrase ‘social listening’, if you research this further) and you will be able to see what people are saying either about you directly or a related topic.
And if you do set up an automated reply to something, like a “thanks for following us”, try not to make it too generic or too impersonal. Always remember, ultimately it’s about talking to other people.
