Ravi Saive: A Technology Blog For Newbies

New bloggers are usually focused on figuring out what to write about, learning the intricacies of HTML visual design, or endlessly revising their bio page. But once you get the I’s dotted and t’s crossed, you realize that it’s all about getting people to read your blog and building a readership community. Without that, it’s like you’re talking to yourself… and maybe a few crickets.

Social Media Monitoring

Bottom line, social media monitoring and management will find you readers and help build your community. Social media monitoring tools work similarly to search engines, but with the advantage of giving you timely results that you can act on immediately instead of a list of blogs that may be too popular to even notice your email.

At its core, social media monitoring lets you create a specific topic search that looks at every social media network, forum and blog on the Internet, and bring back an ever-expanding and updated list of conversations and articles about that topic.

I’m going to walk through an example of how I would start using as a new blogger using Alerti, a fantastic social media monitoring and management service that I’m working with, and show you how their service can help grow your audience.

Alerti Social Media Monitoring and Management in Action

For this example, as a new blogger, you may want to find articles and conversations about “blogging tips” to help yourself learn, and at the same time find places to share your own articles about “blogging tips”. Alerti gives you a simple, effective tool with a single interface to do it from. You can collect and manage relevant information from around the web. Lets set up a keyword search:



After that, you can choose what specific sources to search for content- if you just want articles so that you can read and learn, you can restrict your search to that. If you are looking for conversations to join or places to share your own articles, you can select only the social media sites. Or get them all and decide once you see the content.



You get results right away, and they are updated frequently throughout the day:



You are able to sort results by most recent or most popular and start making connections.



For example, this search yields over 200 results of people talking or writing about “blogging tips” over the past day.

If you just posted an article on your blog about blogging tips, that’s over 200 opportunities to get the word out about your new post. In addition, it’s more than 200 posts or conversations for you to join or learn from.

If you want to turn your results into a visual, you can generate and customize graphs from your data- you can use these for pictures in your own posts, presentations, or just your own research.



Alerti also offers a streamlined content interface, integrated work-flow management, and direct social media profile administration from within their tool. You can also update your Twitter and Facebook profiles from within their tool, and respond from within Alerti straight through Twitter/Facebook when you get search results. And after their 30 day FREE trial, you can use their tool and get the power of the big tools at less than $1 a day.

You can find out more at Alerti, and feel free to email me with any questions about either their service or social media monitoring in general.