As a small business, or if you’re involved in the ongoing development of a large business, a large part of measuring whether your audience is talking about you to other people. Of course, there are awys of generating interest through client newsletters, social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. but what about the overall population? What are they saying about you and your business?

There is now few different ways to track ‘keywords’ through the entire internet. If someone writes something on a blog or forum, even on a social media comment with your name or brand, you can be notified about it. This way, you can deal with any positive or negative press you are receiving. One way is through technorati.com which tracks pretty much every blog on the internet worldwide. Currently they have a list of about 133 million blogs and counting.

Whilst social media is becoming ever more popular. Twitter is the latest in the ongoing saga of who does what at a moments notice. Many people ask ‘Why?’ Don’t try to reason with it, just embrace it as a small business. It can’t hurt. I’ll cover off a way to use Twitter in a different post, but it’s not all about telling everyone what you just had for breakfast. It’s a traffic driver for your website and blog. Great tool for increasing your Google status.

You can now track any number of mentions about keywords, such as your company name, on Twitter using TweetLater. All you do is enter the words you want to track on the site, and when someone talks about you on Twitter, it sends you an email with a link to reply to the post. If you are a small business, you need to take a look at implementing this at some point. It’s not a big effort, just use these two sites, and that should cover the majority of sites comments.

PD