Tracking Your Brand Without Paying Money
With the SaaS business model becoming more popular these days, I thought I would offer up some free methods to track your brand or product mentions across the internet without spending any money. By using a combination of these tools, you can often get results that are very similar to paid services. Some of these are passive alert systems, some operate in real time, and the final tool involves good ole-fashioned manual search.
Google Alerts
A lot of people already know about this one, but I have to include it. You can simply tell Google what keywords to watch out for and have emails sent to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Talkwalker Alerts
I use this in addition to Google Alerts. While Talkwalker also offers paid services to track your branding and reputation, you can use Talkwalker Alerts for free. They function just like Google Alerts, but of course the content it finds is a very useful supplement to Google Alerts. Some results will be redundant, but others will be completely new.
RSS Feeds
This is a highly underrated resource. RSS stands for “Really simple syndication”, and it lets you subscribe to content so you don’t have to manually visit the site every time. You make custom RSS feeds from sources like: like Google News, forums, YouTube channels, blogs, podcasts, etc.
So how do you find these feeds? Some websites will have an RSS icon somewhere in the navbar or footer. If you want to manually search for feeds, sometimes you can find them just by adding /feed or /rss to a URL path.
There are tons of RSS readers, browser extensions, and tools, so I won’t attempt to list them here. If you want to learn more, check out this link.
IFTTT Automations
IFTTT = If this, then that. This handy service allows you to automate tasks. Just think of a simple “If/then” statement.
If [brandname] appears on Reddit, then send email
If [brandname] is mentioned on Twitter, then send push notification to my phone
You can create your own “If/then” statements or use an automation added by the community.
TweetDeck
Note: The origial TweetDeck has since been disctoninued. But if you’re still interested in this type of tool, check out the GitHub repo in the link above.
This is one of the best tools for real time monitoring. You can use this free tool to create live updates for keywords, hashtags, mentions, lists, competitors, etc.
Google Operators
Most internet savvy people already know about these—but I think they still need to be mentioned anyways! You can manually input operators into Google search to refine your results:
"Exact phrase inside quotes" This does exactly what it says.
site: websitecom This searches for results with a specific domain name.
inurl: Searches for words inside the URL itself.
intitle: Searches for results inside an article title or website heading
You can also filter results by date, country, and region.
If you combine some of these methods and tools I mentioned above, you should be able to create a robust reporting mechanism that can monitor brands, names, or topics that you want to track. Good luck!
