You CAN Rock Twitter as a Smaller Brand

I recently wrote a guest post on the DealerRefresh blog about the success of @CarMax on Twitter. While the post was well received, I did hear from many small and independent dealerships who were understandably peeved by my praise. They argued that CarMax is a large dealer group with seemingly infinite resources.  They posted, of course CarMax can rock Twitter, they have the resources. I agree. So today I thought I’d post a few ideas on ways smaller companies can repurpose content and monitor their reputation online with limited time. (This works well for my HR readers too.) Here are a few ideas:

·    Set up your Facebook and LinkedIn pages to repost content from Twitter. In this way, you’re entering your comments once and spreading it across social media sites. This is fairly easy to do:

o   In LinkedIn it’s in the settings tab under “Twitter Settings”.

o   In Facebook it’s under the Notes tab. Click on “Notes Help” and you’ll find “importing Notes from a Blog.”

·    Set up a Google alert. This is a fantastic way to monitor what’s being said about your brand without searching every nook and cranny of the Internet. It’s easy to set up. Search Google Alert and the engine will lead you to an easy form. The form asks for words you want it to search and how often you want updates. A word of caution here – only sign up words specific to your brand or you’ll receive an enormous amount of hits.

·     Search Technorati.  This is a great blogging search tool. You pop in your dealership or brand name and it brings back any results.

·    Check out this awesome listing of social media monitoring solutions from Ken Burbary! Over 100 + ways to monitor your brand across social media. 

I'd love to hear from you on how you track brand reputation when resources are low.