Chapter 2: Creating a Social-Media Listening Hub
- Understanding why you need to monitor your brand
- Finding out which monitoring tools are right for you
- Cleaning and aggregating your monitoring data
- Turning your WordPress Dashboard into a listening post
This chapter focuses on the importance of social-media listening, the free monitoring services available for you to use, and how to integrate these sources into your WordPress installation so that you can turn your run-of-the-mill WordPress installation into a social-media listening hub.
A social-media listening hub is a collection of information from several sources, including mentions of your blog, keywords or topics that you write about, and even information about competitors. You can sign up for services that monitor these topics, such as Radian6 (www.radian6.com), Sysomos (www.sysomos.com), and hundreds of others. (For a complete list of monitoring services, check out http://socialmediaanswers.com/a-list-of-social-media-monitoring-tools). But most of these services cost money and give you another place to log in to — and you may not use this kind of service to its full capability. For a small business or an independent blogger, the investment (both time and financial) doesn't always make sense. By leveraging the power of the WordPress platform, you can easily cut down on both the time and financial commitment of monitoring platforms.
In this chapter, we walk you through determining what sources you should pull your data from, how to determine and search for the keywords you deem important, and how to integrate your search results into your WordPress Dashboard. Additionally, we look at some other tools that can help expand your monitoring practices.