How to Tell When People Are Talking About You Online (Part 3)
This post will tell you how to find tweets to your website which fail to mention your company's Twitter handle.
This is the third and final part in a three-part series that will give you tips for easily monitoring your brand’s reputation online.
Part One covered how to find those that are linking to you online.
Part Three is going to focus on those that tweet a link to your site, but don’t mention you via social media. That might sound a bit obscure, but we’ve found that it happens quite often.
Why this Exists
This post is going to provide you with yet another methodology for efficiently finding those who talk about you online. More specifically, this post will focus on those that tweet a link to your site without mentioning your twitter account.
As we run a blog with regularly scheduled content, we’ve noticed that a good deal of users will tweet our blog posts, and won’t mention @iexposure in their tweet.
Case in point:
Here are seven tweets from a blog post about enhancing your google places page that we missed because no one mentioned us in their tweets.
It’s not that big of a deal, but we love to know who is digging our posts enough to share them with their network. It helps us understand what is relevant to our audience and create new content that truly engages them.
Normally, simply implementing the “Tweet” button with a counter is enough to do the trick. However, I’ve noticed that these tweet counters don’t catch everything, and they don’t retain the information beyond a few days.
This is a problem. Thankfully, there’s a solution.
Enter Topsy (Again)
In order to get accurate and archived Twitter data, you’ll need to use Topsy Analytics. It’s something that I don’t seem to shut up about, but it really is a lovely (and free) tool.
To begin, fire up Chrome, Firefox, or your browser of choice, and head to http://analytics.topsy.com.
Topsy analytics provides a simple and intuitive method for locating tweets with links to a specific domain. I’ve found that it can be a bit buggy when searching for tweets to a specific page, so I generally do a search for the domain itself.
Here’s what you’ll see:
Note that by default, Topsy presents information for high-volume terms - mentions of iPad, Kindle, and Galaxy Nexus. I think they do this just to show you high-volume comparisons.
Set your timeframe (past day, past week, past 2 weeks, past month), and click "lookup."
You are then presented with a chart showing tweets per day with links to any page on iexposure.com. You can hover over each point, and you’ll see detailed information about that day’s tweets.
Click on them, and you’ll see this:
Click the “8 more”, and you’ll be taken to the aforementioned tweets:
As mentioned previously, there were seven tweets about a blog post of ours that we completely missed. When you have hundreds of blog posts, the number of missed opportunities for connecting with awesome people can grow exponentially.
As an added bonus, Topsy has an excellent email alert system. You can set up to be automatically notified of just about anything. We’ve recently set a few up, and highly recommend that you do so as well.
The fun doesn’t stop here.
Using Topsy for Competitive Analysis
Fortunately, there are many more uses for Topsy beyond finding those who tweet a link to your site without mentioning your twitter account.
Let’s say I’m on a social media team, and I’m doing a little competitive analysis. I’d like to see how our competitors stack up against us in the realm of social – I’m curious as to what is being said about them, and who is saying it.
As you can see, you can input up to three queries in Topsy Analytics. Let’s take a look at how iE stacks up against our "main competitors", Google and Apple:
It appears that we have a bit of catch-up to do – so stay tuned for a billion-dollar iE IPO in the coming weeks.
I’m kidding, of course.
I’m not going to go too in-depth here, as I’m sure that you get the idea. You can go through this data and see who and what is being talked about on Twitter with relative ease.
The End of a Series
This concludes the three part series on how to tell when people are talking about you online. Hopefully you were able to learn a thing or two along the way. If you found this series valuable, please share!
Have a question, or a point you'd like to add? Drop a comment below. We answer all of our comments. Finally, if this post inspired you to keep up with our latest blog posts on Twitter, we're there -- @iexposure.
Photo by A. Davey, and licensed through Creative Commons.