Monitoring Your Facebook Pages Just Got Easier: Hyper Alerts

This may be old news to some of you, but a simple new tool now makes it much easier to monitor any and all Facebook pages which you administer.

This new service is called Hyper Alerts, and I first read about it on Mari Smith’s blog, where she does a great job of walking you through the process.

When I speak to small business owners or work with my clients, I always stress the importance of monitoring their social properties. If someone is commenting on your Facebook page, or mentioning you on Twitter, you better know about it. And not only do you need to be listening, you need to respond. If someone asks a question, you need to be able to answer them. As consumers begin to spend more time on social platforms, they expect that the businesses they patronize will do the same. When I call a business, I expect someone to answer, or at least get back to me in a timely fashion. When I walk into a store, I expect to be waited on, not ignored. The same is true of Social Media. As consumers we have expectations. Providing a great customer experience includes responding to social queries in that same timely fashion.

When I stress the need to a)post regular, daily updates, and b) monitor pages throughout the day, business owners somehow make the mental leap that they now need to hire a full-time Social Media person. Nothing could be further from the truth. Using a Facebook page for your business is very manageable, especially over time.

That’s where Hyper Alerts come in. Billed as “the feature that Facebook Forgot,” it is a free service that works in much the same way as Google Alerts (which you should also be using!). Just plug in the URL of each of your Facebook pages, determine what sorts of updates for which you want to receive notifications (this includes posts and comments), and then determine how frequently you want to be notified of updates. In most cases I would say the best option is to get them “as soon as possible” or even “hourly”, so that you can monitor and respond promptly, however you can also set to receive them daily, weekly, or monthly.

Throughout the day you’ll get emails anytime someone interacts with your page(s), with the exception of “likes” on posts and comments. You can easily read what has been posted, and then click through to your page if you need to respond. Very simple.

Here’s the really cool part

The service doesn’t require you to log-in and connect via Facebook connect. That means that you don’t have to worry about any privacy concerns, plus you can use the service to monitor your competition, or any other page. Simply plug in the URLs for your competition, and you’ll receive notifications anytime they update or someone comments on their page. The beauty of this is that you can even see what your competitors and their fans are doing, without having to “like” their page!

I’m not sure why Facebook never included this sort of thing within their business page system, but I’m thankful that this particular service exists. Give it a try, and it will save you some time, and will also allow you to be more prompt in your interactions with customers.

Tagged as: business, facebook, Facebook features, Google Alerts, Hyper Alerts, Mari Smith, Social Media