Keeping tabs on your company with Google Alerts
A piece of advice I frequently give business owners is to keep track of what information is “out there” about their company. It is vitally important to know what is being said about you, and by whom, so you can respond accordingly.
One of the fundamental ways to do this is by entering your name, or that of your business, in a search engine such as Google. While this is easy to do, it can be time-consuming if you have to trawl through pages of results to spot anything new. A faster method, and one I recommend, is to use Google Alerts. This is a free service from Google, with additional advantages. You can, for example, set your own search terms so that Google emails you when it finds references matching your criteria. You can also specify the frequency of your alerts. The insatiably curious can request an alert “As it happens”, or opt for a more casual notice of “Once a week.” My preference is “Once a day”.Google Alerts is beneficial because of its comprehensive search. Its results will include anything on the internet, including social media sites such as FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can use this service not only to monitor what is being said about you and your company, but about your suppliers, customers and competitors. In other words, it keeps you in the loop.Let me know how you get on with Google Alerts.
