How storming that an increasing number of our long-standing and new clients are harnessing the social media toolkit to define the best tools to drive their business goals and vision.

Before dipping your big toe into the more popular sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or blogging, begin with the end in mind and establish their relevance in enabling you to engage with those who will boost your bottom line.

Remember, in this brave new business world it’s all about return on engagement as opposed to return on investment – and the more niche, customer-focused, and ethical you are , the more successful you are likely to be in weathering the economic storm.   

The ability to monitor your online reputation and find out who is saying what about your brand, can be accelerated by a number of listening tools as highlighted below. The trick is to listen and follow conversations about issues, news, people and organisations in your sector before making your social media debut. Enjoy he journey and the Quest team looks forward to blogging and tweeting with you!   

• whostalkin.com – A tool allowing you to search for conversations in social media on any topic or brand.
• socialmention.com – Searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news and video etc.
• google.com/alerts – Allows you to get email updates of the latest relevant google results on a name or topic.
• blogsearch.google.com – Follow what is being said about a specific person or topic in blogs.
• howsociable.com – Monitor mentions of your brand online.
• moreover.com – Keep up to date with all your industry news.
• digg.com – Track news about your business and the most popular news relating to your business.
• reddit.com – Like dig, allows you to track news about your business and the most popular news.
• technorati.com – Track what is being said about you on social media sites.
• blogpulse.com/conversation – Allows you to track who’s linking to a blog post about your company.   
• blogpulse.com/trends – Allows you to track the buzz on particular keywords. Useful for example, to monitor a competitor’s new product launch.
• delicious.com – Makes it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes mention of your company.
• video.google.com – Keep track of videos about you or your company.
• keotag.com – Track if someone tags a page using your company or product name.
• boardtracker.com – Keeps track if you are mentioned on popular forums and message boards.
• google.com/trends – Gives you an idea of which keywords are most searched.
• searchanalytics.compete.com – Allows you to enter a keyword and see which web sites are getting traffic for that keyword. Alternatively enter any domain name and see which keywords are driving traffic to that site.
• backtype.com – Monitor blog comments.
• 123people.com – Search for information on people.
• addictomatic.com – Provides a search interface that runs keyword queries against a load of important social, search and blog services.