Hello reporters! I have some kind of disappointing news today: a lot of people have been asking me lately about “social listening.” That’s where you watch social media for keywords, trends, mentions of your name or company, things along those lines.
Unfortunately, social listening is expensive. I used to recommend Mention, but they went the paid route a while ago. CrowdTangle used to be popular among journalists, but now it’s going under.
There’s a whole slew of social listening tools out there, but they range from the mildly expensive to the mind-bogglingly expensive. So in the end, I settled down on: Google Alerts.
If you haven’t used Google Alerts before, it’s a kind of dinosaur of the Google toolset. I associate it with flash graphics and RSS feeds. But hey, it’s free, it connects to your inbox easily, and it’s still up and running.
On the upside, you can use Advanced Search to set very specific criteria. Do you want new reports on Apple from a government source? A ping when a certain donor is listed in an Excel sheet?
On the downside, Alerts takes about a day to actually end you an alert. Not great for the poor breaking news reporters on here.
If you do need instantaneous updates on trending terms (and I don’t blame you), you are going to have to ask your editor for a budget. If anyone does know of a magical, free social listening tool out there, please share it!