Social media is a relatively new phenomenon, but websites like Twitter, Facebook and even Google have increasingly become a major source of website traffic.
It is critical for your business to be present on these sites, first because customers (present or potential) expect you to be there and secondly for brand building and maintenance.
People are talking about your business and it is absolutely necessary for you to know what they're saying (positive or negative).
However, the tricky part is how to initiate, track and maintain conversations on various social platforms.
The web has recently been flooded with many social networking sites and numerous applications to maintain them.
With so many options available, it becomes very confusing.
Keeping all applications and mediums aside, in this article we talk about two most basic conversation trackers on the two most popular social platforms: 1.
Google Alert Google Alerts is a simple way of getting regular updates about anything that interests you.
It will send you an email any time a new web page appears in the top 20 web results or top ten news results for the terms you specify.
Just set up an account with Google Alert ( http://www.
google.
com/alerts ) and fill in a small form.
So let's say if you want to be notified anytime someone mentions your company name online, you just need to set up an alert and you will start receiving emails (or RSS) with regular updates.
For each alert, you need to decide the following;

• How often the alert should be sent (as it happens, once a day, once a week)
• How you would like to receive the alerts (e-mail or RSS)
• Type of information to search (blogs, news, groups, web, comprehensive, videos)
• The syntax/content of the search (+,-,"", or, not)

Setting up Google Alert is one of the most important and basic tip to start tracking social media conversations and mentions 2.
Twitter Search Like on Google alerts you can see what is happening around the web, with twitter search you can have a look at what people are tweeting about.
Go to the advanced twitter search ( http://search.
twitter.
com/advanced ) and you have various specialized parameters to choose from.
For example; a website design company can look for a term like 'need website' or you can just type your company's name and check what people are tweeting about.
Both these methods pretty much sum up how to start tracking conversations for any business which is new into social media.