Keeping track of what customers are saying about your brand or business online is now an essential part of running a small business.

Participating in discussions across forums, twitter and facebook helps you stay connected with customers and address any concerns or queries they have.

While this might seem like quite a daunting task, thankfully Google Alerts which is one tool which makes this job quite easy. Google Alerts is a service which provides email updates of new content that Google has found across the web.

Setting up a Google Alert for your brand is easy:

1. Visit www.google.com/alerts
2. Enter your business name or brand into the search terms box
3. Select your update frequency (live/daily/weekly)
4. Enter the email address to receive the alerts

Done! Google will now send you summaries of all online activity related to your brand. This can include forum posts, twitter updates, new sites linking to you and any other new content that mentions your brand name.

Bonus Tip: Don’t stop at your brand name, expand your Google Alerts to include some other search terms. Some examples include,

• Your name
• Your products
• Your URL
• Your competitors

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