Social Listening on a Budget: Top Five Ways to Get the Data Without Spending a Dime

See if this scenario sounds familiar:  Your boss’s boss just sent an email asking for details of how people are talking about your brand in the social space.  Your boss forwards it to you and says we need the data ASAP and, by the way, there is no budget for a social listening program.  What’s a smart, hard-working marketer to do? Fear not – we’re here to help. Here are the top five ways to execute Social Listening on a (nonexistent) budget.

1. Set up Google Alerts – this is a no brainer and almost everyone has them; but it might be what you’re not seeing that could be of importance to you. If you’re small, set up a few for your competitor too. You don’t want to miss it when they get a WSJ mention, and you know it before your boss does.

2. Learn Twitter  – you can easily search for Twitter #hashtags to learn about what people are saying about your brand. You can even build feeds with your brand terms to see how often, what gets retweeted, etc.

3. Put Facebook Insights to work –You can see your Fan Page user demographics; likes, lifetime/monthly activity, post views, etc. If you’re able to figure out what / when people are engaging, you can modify your social media strategy to be that much better.

4. Love it, live it:  Topsy – Topsy is the best overarching idea you can get (for free) of what consumers are discussing. You can look up tweets, photos, videos, etc for Google+ or Twitter.

5. Crawl the Social Web: Socialmention.com – just like the homepage says:  it’s like Google Alerts but for social media. It’s an easy way to identify buzz in the social space, as well as any have any relevant news at your disposal.

So there you go – now go get started.  Wow your team with your social monitoring mojo and ability to produce good insight (for free).