Appendix E Research and monitoring tool
Monitoring social media is an intrinsic part of having a social media presence. Even if official government accounts do not exist, monitoring what is said about an issue, agency or topic is an advisable source of intelligence for government. Monitoring social media pertains not only to the activities on an official agency account but also third party accounts, networks and groups.
Alerts
Google alerts - Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. These can be emailed to your gmail address or added to your Google Reader.
Yahoo alerts offer a similar service.
Keyword searches
The following tools search across social media applications; the keyword ‘qld premier’ has been entered as an example.
Social media specific tools
Many tools have been created to help research and monitor particular social media tools. These may be useful for monitoring particular activities on single social media presences. Examples are highlighted in the Choosing a social media tool section of these guidelines.
RSS feeds
Subscribe to RSS feeds in Twitter for keywords relating to your department or campaign. Recommendation to use Google Reader to track RSS feeds.
Instructions on using Google Reader can be found online:
Analytics
Analytics software can provide details of websites linking to your agency website. This information can help discern where traffic is coming from, including official social media presences or other web and social media sources. By identifying these and reviewing the sources of traffic you can analyse the nature of the links and potentially address issues and engage audiences in ways that meet the needs identified from social media chatter at the source of existing traffic.
Google search
View the Google search instructions to improve search results and especially your ability to search within websites to monitor relevant online content.
