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10 Tools to Use to Monitor Your School's Online Presence

As social media marketing has increased in popularity, there have been a plethora of tools designed to monitor your school’s online presence. What are the best ways to track what is being said about your school across the various platforms, websites, social networks, forums, review sites (like Yelp), blogs, etc?

It can be a lot of work to manage the online reputation of your school. But all schools need to pay attention to what is being said to ensure consistency and quality. And, if you find misconceptions or misunderstandings, it’s important that you take the opportunity to be responsive and answer inconsistencies with accuracy.

Here are 10 tools that you can use to monitor mentions of your school (or any other words or phrases that you would like to track and monitor.)

Exclusive Bonus: Download the pdf of 10 Tools to Use to Monitor Your School’s Online Presence to reference in the future.

1. Backtweets

Backtweets is a great tool to use when you are searching for links, @twitterhandles, #hashtags or queries on Twitter.

2. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo has a great free tool that you can use to search individual words or phrases. Try entering the name of your school and see what comes up. There are three premium levels of services that you may want to explore if you want to use a robust suite of features and keep abreast of multiple terms.

3. GigaAlert

GigaAlert is like Google Alerts on steroids. This is such a powerful tool. You can have alerts sent to your email address which is a great feature if you think you might get too busy and forget to use a third party tool (like me.)

4. Google Alerts Google Alerts are a part of the Google suite of free online tools. They are easy to set up; you will receive the alert words and phrases you set up to your Gmail account. You can tell it to search for virtually any term across the web.

5. Mention Mention is one of my favorite online monitoring tools. It specializes in social media monitoring, brand tracking, and web monitoring. While their prices are reasonable, they do have a 30 percent discount for NGOs. Mention also has a great resource library and blog – a brand to definitely check out when it comes to social media marketing.

6. NetVibes

NetVibes is a really cool tool that offers a free and VIP version ($2 per month.) If you’re looking for powerful search engine, dashboard and an exportable RSS feed, this is a great tool to consider. Pricing for the Premium version jumps quite a bit but so do the features. Worth checking out!

7. SocialMention

SocialMention is a free, easy-to-use social tracking tool that you can filter by the following criteria: blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, images, videos, questions. There is an advanced search you can access as well. Highly recommend!

8. Social Media Management Tools

Most social media management tools (Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Social Report, etc.) include a monitoring feature. If you’re using a social media manager/scheduler check to see what monitoring search feature is included.

9. Social Searcher

I love this tool. It’s a simple, no-frills search engine that is quite powerful. The basic tool is free and includes email alerts. This is a great tool that I recommend you check out if you’re looking for a monitoring search tool.

10. Talkwalker

Another great free social media tracking tool that you can use to monitor your school’s brand, campaign, hashtag or event. These tools are extremely useful; they make it easy to monitor your school online because most of them include a notification system to your email so you can act immediately when an alert is generated. If your school marketing is complex, you may want to consider using a mix of these tools to effectively monitor your school’s brand. Have you used any of the above-referenced tools? Have a favorite tool you'd like to add? Please comment below and let me know what you use for monitoring your school's online presence.

Exclusive Bonus: Download the pdf of 10 Tools to Use to Monitor Your School’s Online Presence to reference in the future.

About the author 

Brendan Schneider

Hey, I’m Brendan, and this is my blog. After 28 years working in private, independent schools in mostly admissions, enrollment, marketing, communications, and fundraising roles, I decided to make SchneiderB Media my full-time job, where I help schools get more inquiries through my Fractional Digital Marketer program. I also started the MarCom Society, a membership created expressly to help, support, and train marketing and communications professionals at schools.