Free Alert Tools - How Alerts Are A Marketers Best Friend

As an online business owner or digital marketer, it is critical for you to remain on top of trends happening across the internet which is pretty complicated since trends can spring up from anywhere at any time on any platform.

These could be search trends, social media trends, economic trends, traffic trends, user behaviour trends and more. Tracking trends can give you a strategic first-mover advantage that allows you to land grab early and own key pieces of real estate on the web. It allows you to play into users momentary interest and gain relatively affordable brand exposure and sales.

So you're probably asking how do I keep up with trends? I can't afford to waste time checking Twitter, Scrolling through Facebook or checking the news to see what's happening in internet current affairs.

This is where alerts come in and why I feel it should be every marketer's sacred duty to set up alerts for his or her specific field and make sure they never miss a trend they can participate in.

Follow the trend

Google Alerts - FREE

Google Alerts is a free alert tool that allows you to submit certain keywords and phrases for monitoring. The service will then send emails to you when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that matches your search terms.

Check out Google Alerts

Content Studio - FREE

ContentStudio gives users the ability to discover topic-relevant content filtered by social shares, different media types and virality. Select posts individually from your topic feeds or set up automation campaigns with your own rules and receive alerts based on the criteria. Its free offering is extremely limited so don't expect much from this tool if you're not willing to pull out the credit card.

Check out Content Studio

SocialHub - FREE

SocialHub Alerts claims to crawl over 400 Million sources to find your brand mentions instantly on social media, the web, forums, blogs and news sites. When signing up, you will receive a daily report of your search results via email. Its offering is similar to Google Alerts but adds in more search results and includes social media mentions.

Check out SocialHub

Socialmention - FREE

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates from across user-generated content platforms and pulls it into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Check out Social Mention

Talkwalkers - FREE

Talkwalkers allows you to monitor the web for interesting new content about your name, brand, competitors, events or any favourite topic with its alerts offering. Talkwalkers offers you a free demo to test out the platform which is naturally very limiting and tries to drive you to their paid option so don't expect much from this one.

Check out Talkwalkers

Note: If you want to take your alerts more seriously there are plenty of paid options available. I will tackle paid alert tools in a future post so be sure to visit us soon or sign up for our newsletter to get our latest posts sent to directly to you

Keep up to date with trends

As the hype around the social media listening grows, it seems natural that tools of this kind come and go. The ones that stay are constantly undergoing major changes and improvements. While the value of riding trends is apparent, not every trend would be applicable to your business, and you'll need to be strategic in which ones you jump on as an opportunity.

Contact us

If you want to know more about voice search optimisation, don’t be shy we’re happy to assist. Simply contact us here

Tags: google analytics, Google Search