Are Google Alerts Case Sensitive?

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Amanda O'Brien

Google AlertsWe got this question last week and thought I would quickly answer it here.

Google Alerts is a great free service that scours the internet for mentions of keywords that interest you and then they ‘alert’ you when the terms you are tracking are found.

You can set up to receive the alerts as they happen, daily or weekly. For example if I wanted, I could make a Google Alert for the term “Social Media Breakfast Maine” and when we were mentioned, I would be alerted. This is a really easy way to see if people are writing blogs about you, there is news about you or just to see if people are talking about you.

So the question was, are those terms case sensitive. The answer is no. Upper case, lower case… doesn’t matter.

So go ahead. Set up Google Alerts for your name, your company, maybe even your competitors names or common misspellings of your name.

A few tips:

  • Always put quotation marks around the query you are setting up the alert for. That way you will get the exact match for that phrase.
  • Set up the digests to come to you weekly or daily but most likely setting them us as they happen will be unnecessary and very distracting.

Good luck and happy monitoring!

Posted in Marketing, Social Media Tips | Leave a comment

Social, Social – New Press Herald Blog

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Amanda O'Brien

Rob Gould headshotOur friend, Rob Gould, has just started a new blog for the Press Herald called Social, Social. The tagline is ‘Social media for everyone, from the C-Suite to the street’. I am excited to see where this goes.

Rob is going to talk about social media developments, reflect on things happening in the space and interview a lot of different people on how they use social media. I think Rob’s perspective and network are going to make this an interesting blog to follow.

Hopefully he will be part of the change of demystifying social media and making it just a part of the conversation about how we now live our lives and do business now.

Posted in In the News, Maine, Social Media | 1 Comment

Foursquare Gives Businesses More Access to Visitor Information

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Amanda O'Brien

Foursquare recently and quietly updated their privacy policy. You can check it out here or the condensed version here. One major change in there is the information businesses are able to access about people who check-in to their establishments.

Previously businesses could only see who had been in their establishment in the past three hours and the ten people who visited their business the most. They also could only see the first names and last initial of those visitors.

With the new update, businesses can view more than the three hour span, they can see specific times of visits and have access to visitor’s first and last names.

Another good update for businesses is that now when you add your business Twitter account to your Foursquare account, when people check-in at your business and tweet about it, your Twitter handle will be added to the tweet.

So what does this mean for you as a business owner?

  • If you haven’t already, claim your business listing on Foursquare
  • Review your business’ Foursquare Analytics to get insight on who is visiting your business when and what they have to say about it.
  • Connect your Twitter account to your Foursquare listing
  • Take all this new information and make some changes – specials during slow times, get to know your VIP customers, interact with people who check in on Twitter, ask people to leave tips and reviews etc.
Posted in Foursquare | Leave a comment

Little Known But Useful Tool: Facebook Debugger

Posted on November 15, 2012 by admin
Some of you may already know about the Facebook Debugger tool, but I thought I’d share it for those who don’t. It’s a handy little tool for developers that’s been around for awhile, but it can come in handy for all of us.

Ever start to post something to your Facebook page and run into a not-so-great link preview? Sometimes it’s missing an image when you know there are many on the page. Other times the description snippet is old and doesn’t accurately reflect the current content. Of course you can edit the title and description if you click on them in the preview, but if that link then gets shared by your followers — it reverts back to the original. You may not be getting the preview you expect because the data has been cached.

Enter the Facebook Debugger tool: pop the URL you’re having an issue with into the tool and voila! — the cache is cleared. It will spit out a lot of technical info, but what you care about is the cache clear happening behind the scenes. When you go to post your link again you’ll see an updated link preview that reflects all of the current content. The tool wasn’t originally developed for this specific purpose, but that’s ok — still serves a great purpose.

Anyone else have any handy tools they use like this one?

Using the Facebook debugger tool
Posted in Facebook, Social Media Tips | Leave a comment