Know what people are saying about your product or services

There is no cheaper marketing means than the people themselves. If you have some customers or buyers then you’ll get some marketing for sure. Some of them may bring more customer to your service and you’ll loose on some other cases. It all depends upon what people tell others or what people talk about your products with other.

If you know what others are talking about your product then you can easily make improvements on your service. You can alter your marketing tactics as well according to the peoples view on your product.

So How do you know what other people are talking about your product? I’m going to list out few free web services which you can use to track what people are talking about your product.

1. TweetDeck
Twitter is first place for most of people talk about something. Be it good or bad. So you can track twitter to the first view of someone about your product. And TweetDeck makes it easy.

There’s a feature in TweetDeck with which you can create a separate column for each of your keyword which pulls all the tweets about that certain keyword. You know the rest. Simply create different column for all your keywords. It should not be hard to track tweets about your products unless you have 100s of products.

2. Google Blog Search with Google Reader
Yes there’s Technorati but Google Blog search is equally good and it works wonderfully with Google reader. There might be do the same with Technorati too but since I’m a Google fan, I won’t look outside unless the almighty Google doesn’t have it.

A good feature about Google blogsearch is you can have a RSS feed for the blog search of your keyword. All you have to do after than is subscribe do that feed on your Google Reader. You’ll be able to track all the blog posts about your product.

3. BackType
Backtype is a free service which tracks all the blog comments about certain keywords. And then it sends you email alerts of all the comments where your keywords have been mentioned.

4. BoardTracker
Discussion forums are the place where most of the discussion about any products goes. If someone wants to know about certain product first thing he does is search in Google. And next if he is member of a discussion forum then he asks there “what do you think about this product?” or “have anyone ever used this?”.

So here comes Boardtracker which tracks all the discussion about certain keywords within the discussion forums. Again, its free.

5. Google Alert of course
This is probably the most famous one everybody knows about. But what people don’t know about Google Alert is how to use it more efficiently. For example, if you are Wordpress developer then you may be interested at what people are talking about your product in wordpress.org? I mean in the blog inside wordpress.org or in the discussion forum within wordpress.org? What people are talking about your webhosting service in a particular website lets say Webhostingtalk? What you need to do for this is set the Google Alert for “site:wordpress.org keyword”.Basically, you can use all the advanced search strings you can perform in Google on Google Alerts too.

Here is an article on how you can use Google Alerts to get best of it.

Use these 5 tools mentioned above and you’ll never miss a single discussion about your product or services.