“There really isn’t any excuse good enough for why [your school is] not actively managing efforts to ensure your school’s story is delivered with the excellence it deserves.

So, how do you go about monitoring efforts when you’re not a professional marketing guru and you’re wearing twelve other hats that are all equally as—if not more so—important? We have a few suggestions to get you started.”

Here are four simple tips for how to manage content.

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Social Media Management

If you need help managing your social message, try these free and inexpensive tools for sending one message out on ALL of your networks.

It’s helpful to monitor your school online, so you can engage when appropriate and respond when necessary.

These tools are time-savers that make monitoring easy. Many of these tools are notification systems that allow you to act when you see alerts. And most, if not all, of these platforms have a real-time search component.

If you’re monitoring a school of any size, a combination of these tools will help you stay on top of the conversations and become part of your social community.

Hootsuite

Perhaps the easiest and most common brand-conversation monitor is Hootsuite. It helps you keep on top of chatter in real time on social media platforms such as Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn.

To use Hootsuite most effectively, craft a stream with the keyword that represents your search.

First, add a stream, and then select the keyword. Now, select the account under which you’re monitoring the brand. Next, type in the keyword or phrase. Add it, and then add the stream.

Use Hootsuite to monitor social conversations by adding a keyword or phrase in a stream. You can also do searches for your brand on Hootsuite for Twitter and Facebook. There are free, pro and enterprise accounts available.

Social Mention

Social Mention is an excellent way to learn about brand mentions and interactions in an easy-to-digest visual format.

Type in the name and click Search to see the links to your mentions. Sort by timeframe or source.

Also, find your brand’s strength (how often it’s being discussed), the passion of the posting (how likely someone will repeat the mention), the sentiment (positive to negative) and the reach (measure of influence). Learn the top keywords, users, hashtags and sources as well.

Social Mention is an excellent way to search for people who are talking about your brand.
Plus, get an RSS feed of your mentions to stay in the loop. Social Mention is a free online service.

Mention

Mention is one of the newer tools that replaced Google Alerts. (Google Alerts would send emails notifying you whenever a keyword or phrase you specified was cited online.)

Mention is a way to visualize your online presence, separating the signals you want from the rest of the noise online. The platform allows you to monitor millions of sources in real time and in 42 languages, so you can react and interact.

Mention allows you to monitor and respond in real time.
Do an online search or elect to receive a daily email of the aggregate of mentions from the previous day. Plus, if you work with a group or large company, export stats to PDF or CSV, so you can share data with your team.

Mention offers a 14-day free trial, and then a variety of plans from which to choose. The free basic plan is one alert, one user, 250 mentions/month.

Talkwalker

Use Talkwalker Alerts to set up a search query for your keyword or phrase. Narrow the returned data by result type, language, frequency and quantity.

Set up keyword or phrase searches through Talkwalker Alerts.
Talkwalker gives you brand mentions over time, as well as the sources where these mentions occur. Learn about the performance of the brand mention, the engagement levels, influencers talking about your brand (this includes websites, as well as social media), sentiment analysis, general themes featured in a tag cloud and demographic data (location, language and gender breakdowns).

There’s even a world map tracking where conversations originate. Pie charts hover over every location to indicate the sentiment in each country.

Talkwalker Alerts narrow keyword performance by many factors, including geographic location.
While Talkwalker Alerts is another free service to use as a replacement for Google Alerts, I don’t find it as comprehensive or thorough as Mention. For example, on one of my searches, Talkwalker found about 50% of the references that Mention located. However, I use them in tandem to ensure I have decent coverage.