Google Alerts and Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Social Media Presence

Are you interested in monitoring what consumers and competitors are saying about your brand? Google Alerts is a free tool for social media presence monitoring. In this article, we feature Google alerts and Artificial Intelligence for social media monitoring.

Social media does an amazing job when it comes to brand marketing. Social media also serves as a platform for expressing views and opinions that your customers, as well as your competitors, regularly use. Therefore, it is important that brand managers monitor what is happening on social media.

With social media being an opinion-expressing platform, there is a high likelihood it is used against your brand. If you let the negative publicity just go unchecked, it will definitely hurt you. The effectiveness of brand monitoring depends on how well you execute it.

The most popular reason why brands want to engage in brand monitoring is to manage their online reputation. Consider that 87% of consumers conduct an online search before purchasing. It is obvious that a negative comment will hurt your sales.

Are you concerned about improving your brand image on social media? It is time you consider proactively monitoring your brand’s presence on the web. You can monitor your social media presence with free tools like Google Alerts. However, for advanced monitoring, take advantage of advanced AI-enabled tools.

Google Alerts for Social Media Monitoring

Google offers this intuitive tool used for monitoring social media presence. The free tool supports monitoring any topic or keyword across the Internet. Set up Google alerts and begin receiving e-mail notifications for the identified topics direct to your email.

How to Setup Google Alerts

Google offers custom options used for setting up the Google Alerts feature. The tool allows you to choose the notification frequency. You can also define where these alerts emanate from. Other customizations include the language, country of results, the quality of the results, as well as where to receive the notifications. Here are the steps to be used to set up this free monitoring tool.

Steps for creating the Google Alerts Feature

Step#1. Open Google Alerts on a web browser and select the account you want to use.

Step#2. Select the Keywords to monitor. When setting up the keywords, ensure you go for the unique keywords.

Hint: Avoid using brand names that will result in a lot of noise. For instance, setting up “Bitcoin” as the keyword might end up bringing you a lot of noise. Try to choose more unique keywords. You can choose something like “Bitcoin Price today” if interested in receiving the exchange rate.

Step#3. Set the Notification Frequency: how often would you want to receive the notifications or the alerts? You can choose real-time notifications by selecting the “as it happens” option.

Step#4. Set the Sources: As mentioned, Google Alerts allows you to customize the areas to track. Note that the free tool does not support social media platforms yet.

Step#5. Select the Language.

Step#6. Choose the region.

Step#7. Choose whether to allow Google to choose important ones or send you notifications on everything. If you just want to be notified about the important only, tap on “Only the best”. Otherwise, tap on “everything”.

Step#8. Set the email address where the notification/alerts will be sent.

Step#9. Tap Create Alert to complete the setup and start receiving the alerts.

Those easy steps allow you to create Google Alerts. Nevertheless, is Google Alerts the Best Approach?

With Google being an established company, there is a perception it is the best tool to use for brand monitoring.

I too agree that Google Alerts is a super useful tool that is versatile and an easy-to-use monitoring tool. Well, the free tool comes with some limitations.

Google Alerts Limitations

First, Google Alerts only allows monitoring the web pages and not social media. Here is a screenshot showing the sources you can monitor using this free tool.

Source: Google alerts

As you can see, the Google Alerts feature will not notify you of what is happening on social media. With the social media platform registering billions of users, you might be missing a lot of what is going on.

Using AI-enabled tools allows you to follow the social media happenings closely. Mentionlytics is a good alternative offering you a good ability to monitor what is happening in the world of social media.

So what do the AI-enabled social media monitoring tools have to offer a brand?

#1 Intelligent Social Media and Web Brand Monitoring

Your competitors and customers will use both web-based platforms and social media platforms. As seen, the Google Alerts free tool only monitors the Google search results. This is news, blogs, etc. The advantage of the AI-enabled tools is that you can monitor the web search results as well as the social media platforms. Mentionlytics allows you to achieve exactly this.

Through AI-enabled tools, a business can get smarter insights. Consider that the tool applies artificial intelligence analysis. Through advanced machine learning algorithms, a business can track mentions across the Internet.

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#2 See the Most Important Web and Social Mentions

Using the AI-enabled social media monitoring tools; you can see the engagement rate, the reach, and the sentiments on a particular post. The engagement rate refers to a metric used for measuring the level of engagement content has created. This content can be user-generated or generated by your marketing department. In other words, you are able to gauge the impact a post has had.

To determine the engagement rate, you need to check likes, shares, and comments. An AI-enabled social media monitoring tool will give you these results. It is a useful feature allowing a brand to measure or evaluate the impact created by a post on social media. A post with a high number of likes, comments, and shares has a high impact.

AI-enabled social media monitoring tools will calculate the engagement rate relative to the number of followers.

#3 Know the Actual Profiles that Mentioned Your Brand in a Negative way

Through the AI-enabled social media monitoring tools, you can troll the mentions to the exact profiles they emanated from. The advantage of this is that you are able to respond to the specific profile in the right manner. By trolling the comments to where they are coming from, you can work on resolving the matter.

Handling customer complaints requires an effective complaint management solution in place. Remember that a positive or negative customer opinion will affect the business. In case of negative comments, knowing who sent the complaints helps your business to personalize the resolution. Customers will always appreciate custom responses.

#4 Intelligent Social Media Tool enables Discovery of Brands Fans and Ambassadors

There are dozens of loyal customers sharing positive comments about brands, products, or services. These brand fans can become effective marketing ambassadors in the end. Through a proper monitoring tool that is AI-enabled, you can identify them. AI-enabled brand monitoring allows a business to recognize potential influencers.

Are you focusing on starting an influencer marketing campaign? To run an effective influencer marketing campaign, you need to identify a potential influencer. To do so, start monitoring their engagement rate on social media. The influencers who have shown interest in your brand and attracted positive comments can be a great choice for your campaigns. We can see that social media monitoring allows you to find the influencers that can work with you to improve your brand online.

#5 AI-enabled Social Media Monitoring Tools can Advice you on How to Improve the Social Media Posts

Through intelligently monitoring social media posts, you can gain insights on how to improve them. You are able to learn the days when a post generates high engagement rates. In addition, you can automatically find the hashtags that perform better when used on social media posts.

The smart social media monitoring tools also come with a capability to remind you when reposting is great to drive more engagements. According to Wordstream.com, repurposing makes the most of the effort you have already put in hence you are able to get more value. The best way for identifying the content that can be repurposed is by monitoring the previous blogs. A blog with a high engagement rate will do great if repurposed.

#6 Social Media Monitoring helps Find Competitors and Industry Insights

Your competitors are active on social media and the web in general. The competitors are posting on social media and commenting on blogs. Using Google Alerts, you can monitor their comments on blog posts. You need the AI-enabled social media monitoring tools to be able to monitor them on social media as well.

Advanced Social media monitoring tools allow brands to find popular sites where their competitors appear. This allows you to create a way to appear on these sites’ tools. That way, you are building your competitiveness and increasing the market share. In other words, intelligent social media monitoring allows you to sites that are important to your industry.

#7 Social Media Monitoring for Viral Content Detection

Social media spreads viral content faster compared to blog posts. In fact, the social media platform will help to make a blog go viral. Intelligent social media monitoring allows you to quickly identify content that has the potential to go viral. Thus, you can spot a crisis as it starts. This allows a brand to take appropriate actions before it becomes too late. You are able to detect a viral event, as it happens to control it or promote it in the case of content that creates a positive impact.

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Key Takeaway

The Google Alerts feature is easy to set up. However, the disadvantage is that the Google news alert feature does not support social media yet. Therefore, if you create Google Alert, you will not effectively monitor what is happening on social media. Instead, make use of the advanced social media monitoring tools. The artificial intelligence-enabled tools will monitor brand mentions across the Internet. As seen. Mentionlytics is a good example of AI-enabled social media monitoring tools. Try Mentionlytics APP for free today.