Did you know that Google will send you emails whenever your business is mentioned anywhere on the internet? Well, just about anywhere. And it’s free.
Here’s how to set up a Google Alert:
- Log into your Google account. If you don’t have one, get it. There are tons of useful and free applications available to you.
- Visit http://google.com/alerts
- Enter your company name within quotation marks, like so: “Company Name”
- Choose what type of content you’d like to be notified about: blogs, news articles, websites, videos, groups, or EVERYTHING. I usually go with everything.
- Choose how often you’d like to receive alert emails.
- Choose how many alerts each email will contain (20 or 50).
- Choose to have it emailed, or if you’d rather they’ll collect the results in an RSS feed you can follow using your RSS reader.
And that’s it! Any time your business is mentioned on the web, you’ll get a notice telling you about it. This is great for proactive customer service because you can find out when people are blogging about problems with your product, and address them directly. You may not always know if your company is mentioned in a news article, but with Google Alerts you can be prepared if a story about you is published and be ready for an influx of customers.
Are you using Google Alerts? Let us know how they’re helping you in the comments.
