Monitor Social Media Comments with Google
There is not one surefire way to catch any social media mention of your company or business. Some social media monitoring services find a few instances, others find more, and yet another may find something different. But many business owners have found complete results to be fairly elusive.
The good side of all this is that after you register for monitoring on more than one service or RSS feed (more on RSS further on), most e-mail you the results and the costs are nil or minimal. You get notifications daily or as they occur (once a day is fine).
Sometimes the most obvious answers slip our minds. Doing a web search on Google or Bing can help you find up-to-the moment as well as archived postings on the web. (Yes, you can find posts as far back as the early 90s.)
The problem is, performing a simple and accurate search on the web isn’t quite so easy. Think about this: Of the 7 billion people in the world, 315 million live in the United States. A projected 80 percent of the U.S. population is online (an estimated 175 million on Facebook alone).
Imagine the number of online entries if each person posts one sentence a week. Studies show that an average visit to a web page triggers 56 instances of data collection — that’s a lot of files.
It’s difficult to fathom how much information is out there, but a huge portion is at your fingertips if you know a few search tricks to streamline your results, or you use a social monitoring service.
When performing web searches, capital letters are not read by the query engine, so capitalization is not required. The only place capitalization does count is in the few search operands mentioned in this section.
Web Design & Development Glossary
