From the Wired Advisor eMarketing Toolbox
I am a huge fan of finding simple and efficient ways to track your social media activity. I’ve been experimenting with POSTLING for awhile now, and the service has really grown on me as a personal brand monitoring tool!
In the past we’ve reviewed Nutshell Mail which is another tool that allows you to track and monitor your social streams. What I love about both Nutshell Mail and Postling is that results are delivered to your email inbox. Why is this important? Social media monitoring through your email inbox allows you to more efficiently manage your time with your social media efforts, focus on what’s important, and prevent you from getting sucked in!
Postling is designed with the small business owner and professional in mind. With most of the social media brand tracking systems that exist, I have found that they are just overkill for a professional’s needs, and they can also be expensive. Postling is clean and simple, and you can get many of the features for FREE.
Benefits of Postling for Social Media Tracking and Monitoring
1)Simple social media and online reputation management for small business owners and professionals
Track comments, replies, mentions, social streams, posts to your social media profiles, RSS feeds and keyword searches (premium feature).
2)Delivery of updates to your email inbox
As mentioned, I’m a big fan of email inbox delivery. With Postling you can have an email digest sent to you from the prior day’s activity. (It would be nice if you could have your updates emailed to you more frequently rather than a once a day digest of the prior day’s activities, although you can log in to your dashboard to get real time results)
3)Publish, schedule, and post directly to your blog and social profiles
I’m currently writing this blog post within Postling! Postling offers a very clean and easy to use editor that works well with WordPress. You can also schedule your posts and share them on all of your networks directly from Postling.
4)Post directly to your social media accounts using bit.ly url link shortener.
I love bit.ly because you can track clicks to your links and use different links for different sources to see what content is getting more attention.
5)Monitor and reply through the Postling dashboard
Within Postling itself, you can monitor your social media streams (although I prefer Nutshell Mail and Hootsuite for comprehensive monitoring as there is really no intelligent way to filter your streams within Postling). However, it is nice that you can “reply” and “share” to tweets and posts on your Facebook Profile or Pages directly from your Postling dashboard.
6)Add users to help manage and monitor your social accounts
Perhaps you would like to engage your assistant or a team member to help you monitor? It is simple to add users to your account in Postling.
Premium features of Postling include the ability to monitor RSS feeds (monitor competitor blogs, specific Google and Twitter searches, for example), track keyword phrases, and get real time web tracking. There are other free services out there that can do some of this for you such as Google Alerts or Social Mention. The benefit of integrating these options into Postling is that all of your tracking and monitoring is in one place and comes to you in one email daily versus multiple emails cluttering your inbox.
The bottom line is I’m finding Postling to be an efficient and effective tool for tracking your online reputation and social media presence without having to log in to all of your social accounts numerous time daily. However, if you are more interested in engaging in real time conversation, you might consider supplementing with the additional tools mentioned above (Hootsuite and Nutshell Mail). You can sign up for free versions of both of these tools.
