Top 3 Best Tools For Building Credible Online Presence in 2011

Everyone is online in 2011; but with all of the social media out there, you need to be able to manage your accounts, target your audience and monitor your presence. Here are three tools you would want to be connected to in order to be a successful social media consumer: QuantCast, TweetDeck and GigaAlert.

How to Use QuantCast For Your Positive Online Presence

QuantCast.com is an online source that shows you site traffic for social media based on demographics and geographical location. This site allows you to explore, in detail, certain sites that you wish to target based on how many people use the site, who they are, what they do, where they’re located and how much money they make. Whether you’re trying to reach a specific audience for business or professional reasons, quantcast.com allows you to measure site traffic and reach your intended audience efficiently.

Salient Features

Once you sign up and become a member, you can get started searching social media site traffic. You need to get “quantified” in order to browse site traffic for other websites. Quantcast will prompt you to “Generate Your Quantcast Tag” where you will take tag and place it on every page of your website; then “Scan your Site.” After you’ve quantified your website, you’re able to browse around, looking at site traffic based on demographics, geographic locations, using graphs.

How to Use TweetDeck For Creating Positive Online Presence

TweetDeck enables you to manage your social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Buzz and Foursquare from your TweetDeck account. No longer do you have to worry about logging on to each sight separately, viewing your accounts from six different screens and separately updating each status. It’s simple – go to TweetDeck.com and download the program; and log on to start receiving your notifications from one centralized location. With TweetDeck, you log on, rearrange your dashboard to fit your personal needs and set the preference and settings to what you want.

Salient Features

In an effort to manage your online presence and see who is posting about you, you can create a search with your name and different variations of your name and when someone mentions you in their posts; it directly links back to your TweetDeck. After you’ve added all of your accounts and you want to post a status to certain sites, you can highlight which sites your post will update to. So, if you’re inappropriate side gets the best of you and you don’t want your LinkedIn connections to be notified, then you don’t highlight that account. This program allows you to manage several sites and several accounts at once. It’s an easier, faster way to stay connect while monitoring your online presence.

How to Use GigaAlert For Your Online Presence

GoogleAlert.com, also known as GigaAlert, does the same presence monitoring that TweetDeck can do, except on a much deeper level. GigaAlert allows you to monitor websites and content based on the search criteria you set up when beginning your account. This sight is great for monitoring your online content and your online presence through e-mail, iGoogle, or web feed notifications sent to you when content matching your search criteria, appears. This sight allows you to gain control over that mass of messages and media online that directly affect you and your online presence.

Salient Features:

After you’ve created your account, go to search settings and add websites, pages and name variations that you wish to be monitored. When adding name variations, make sure you put each name set in quotes; if you have an unusual name, be sure to include several different variations, including ones that people tend to mistake your name for. After you’ve done your search, you will be taken to your results and they will be e-mailed to you – every time you get a hit on your search criteria, an e-mail notification will be sent, allowing you to go straight to the link and monitor your searches.

UPDATE! Giga Alert is not affiliated with Google, but they own the domain www.googlealert.com, and until recently they called their service “Google Alert.” Giga Alert is a fee-based subscription service, while Google Alerts are free.

Being able to take advantage of the web, target your intended audience and monitor your online presence is essential to today’s growing technology; it’s only going to get more convoluted, fast-paced and hard to manage.  Quantcast, TweetDeck, and GigaAlert are three sites in 2011 that will help keep you on track, on time and onboard. You might also interested in knowing How to Safeguard Your Business With Online Reputation Management!

Author Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education and performs research surrounding online degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.