Freelancers Monitor Your Personal Brand on Social Media

Freelancers Monitor Your Personal Brand on Social MediaFreelancers Monitor Your Personal Brand on Social Media2Youre a freelancer, bedrngnis a big company. Why do you need to monitor your personal brand on social media? Why do you need a personal brand to begin with?On a very basic level, the answer is this with the level of competition in the freelancing world, one of the most important things you need to build is your personal brand. You need to present yourself as a distinct identity that stands out so you can draw prospective clients and retain existing ones.Having established the need for personal branding, it is not difficult to come up with compelling reasons to monitor your brand, particularly to know what people are saying about you on social media.Here is why you should monitor your personal brand on social media, and tools you can use to do itWhy you should monitor your personal brand on social mediaThe main reason is this to know what your clients are saying about you.Its not that different from what the social media teams of big companies do. They monitor what their customers are saying about them on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.Knowledge is power, and in this case, that knowledge is the feedback that you discover by monitoring your brand on social media.Knowing, on its own, does not mean anything unless you act on what you discover. If, for example, you read a negative tweet about your service, then you can promptly reply to that tweet in a manner that will address the issue.On the other hand, if you find a positive tweet, then you can engage that person by saying thanks and/or retweeting. Additionally, if you see that your work has been retweeted by others- whether they are influential or not- you can build relationships by replying.All these lead to building an even more credible personal brand, which, in turn, can lead to more clients.Tools to monitor your personal brand on social mediaWith Twitter and Facebook, it is rather easy to d iscover ()mentions, retweets, replies, and tags. But what if you are mentioned in such a way that you are not made aware of it?Thats where tools for social media monitoring come into play. There are a lot of these tools, but if youre a freelancer, you probably want to spend as little as you can. Here are some free tools that will help you monitor your personal brand on social media.Google Alerts Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to discover any mention about you or your brand. You simply have to sign up using your Google account- which I assume you already have- and select keywords (your personal name/brand in this case) for Google to monitor. Whenever there is a mention of those keywords, Google will send them to your inbox.Social Mention This listening tool gives you a lot of information about what people are saying about you online, from Twitter to Facebook to blogs to other platforms. All you need to do is to enter your personal brand (or any other keyword you want to s earch for), and youll get tons of results where it has been mentioned. On top of that, you can see other information such as top keywords, sentiment, sources, hashtags, etc.Meltwater IceRocket Similar to Social Mention, this tool is an easy way to find out what people are saying about your brand. You may opt to search for mentions of your brand on different platforms blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. The results that are shown include the links that people used when mentioning your brand, giving you further opportunity to act on the information.Readers, do you monitor your personal brand online? What tools do you use? Share with us belowNoemi Tasarra-Twigg is the editor of BloggingPro, a site that offers news, plugins, and themes related to blogging. She also writes about tech, geek, and freelance writing. You can find her on Twitter.Ready to start searching for freelance jobs? Start here Let us help you stay motivatedGet Freelance Jobs blog posts emailed to youor have them delivered t o your favorite feed reader.Sign up now