Merry Christmas from all of us here at Todaymade! Wishing you 25 awesome days of family, friends, holiday cheer, and TodayLaunch.

You now have an affordable option when it comes to managing your brand’s social media, and it’s called TodayLaunch.

The social media dashboard with the exciting rocket logo that you can afford.

TodayLaunch solves the most common frustrations we all have with social media management tools. Read the user comments on any social media site, and you’ll see people struggling with tools that keep them from being productive, that make simple tasks complex, and that price the little guy from having access to full features.

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Ever wonder why TodayLaunch was so fast, and how it handles so much data? Justin gives us a behind-the-scenes look.

Monitors are made up of many search pieces, including Twitter, blog, and news searches, as well as RSS feeds.

Google Alerts are the easiest way to be notified when new content on a topic of your choice pops up on the Internet. The power of Google search, combined with some customizations and a delivery method of your choosing, make it ideal.

What does that mean for TodayLaunch users? You can integrate these Google Alerts into your TodayLaunch monitors to increase your brand and industry monitoring abilities.

Each TodayLaunch monitor is like a puzzle, made up of search pieces that include Twitter, Google Blog Search, Google News, and RSS feeds. We’ll set up our Google Alert and bring it into TodayLaunch through the RSS feed option. You’ll want to add this additional level of monitoring because Google Alerts function slightly different than a regular Google search. It collects the top search returns with recently published content, and tries to prioritize relevant search returns. This adds the general web, video, and discussion groups to your TodayLaunch monitoring capabilities.

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TripAdvisor is growing in popularity and in reviews. For businesses in the travel or restaurant industry, it can’t be ignored.

Tracking reviews is an elusive sport. Really, when it comes to social media, everything is a review, a vote of support. But there are those kinds of reviews, and then there are the Reviews, the ones where your business is getting judged on a scale.

TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google+ Pages/Places, Yahoo Places, Foursquare, Urbanspoon — these are just a few of the most popular services customers use to make a review. TripAdvisor alone had managed to accumulate more than 45 million reviews at a rate of about 23 reviews each minute by mid-2011. That’s a lot of people talking about the over-cooked pasta or fluffy hotel pillows.

It's like obituaries, when you die they finally give you good reviews. -- Roger MarisClick To Tweet

A Review Of Brand Monitoring

You’re a business owner. You know you need to hear what customers are saying about your business. But how to do it? First off, if you haven’t staked your claim on these sites, stop reading now. Do that first. We tell you how to do that here.

If you’ve been with us for even a few weeks, you’ve already done some important steps in setting up TodayLaunch to help you monitor customer feedback:

1. You learned how to respond to negative feedback. (Learn it here.)
2. You mastered the basics of setting up a monitoring system for Twitter, Facebook, and general online feedback. (Learn it here.)
3. You beefed up your Twitter search settings and aren’t missing a thing your customers are saying there, either. (Learn it here.)

Next up?

TripAdvisor, that 45 million-review behemoth. If your business is in the food, hotel, or travel industry, you’ll want to monitor TripAdvisor. Happily, this particular site allows you to grab an RSS feed of reviews left on your specific business listing page. This makes it super easy to monitor.

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Let TodayLaunch do your work for you, with the new queue feature.

What Is The Queue?

TodayLaunch’s queue feature helps make your workload lighter while maintaining a constant social media presence.

It allows you to reduce some of your decision-making process just to what content you want to share on your social networks, relieving you of the time it takes to hard-schedule it and decide when it should run. Find it, queue it, forget it.

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Let TodayLaunch do your work for you, with the new queue feature.

TodayLaunch wants to do your work for you, even when you’re not around.

Scheduling content for publishing is perfect when you have specific days and times in mind. There are times, though, when you would rather share content without the burden of specifying when.

That’s where the  new TodayLaunch queue comes in.

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TodayLaunch: From great to awesome in 1.2 seconds.

We took a Corvette and made it into a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport* without you even realizing it. TodayLaunch now features Real-Time updates for all of your Facebook accounts. It was fast before, but now it’s even faster. It’s almost a blur.

What does this mean for me?

Basically, you’ll know when things happen when they happen.

As your friends and fans shower your content with likes, leave witty comments on your Timeline, or write life-changing posts, these actions will show up within seconds in TodayLaunch. Whether it’s your personal Facebook profile or your brand’s page, you’ll still reap the benefits of this super-fast feature. Monitoring your brand has just gotten that much faster.

Will this change how I use TodayLaunch?

Nope.

The way you use TodayLaunch won’t be affected one bit. You’ve become accustomed to driving it before this speed upgrade, and you can keep right on driving. These changes will all happen under the hood. The main difference will be an Inbox that’s fresher, more active, and happier than ever to help you be better at social media marketing.

Head on over to your TodayLaunch Inbox and see it for yourself. Don’t have a TodayLaunch account yet? Sign up now for your free account and take it for a spin!

Sign up for your free TodayLaunch account today.

*This is a super-fast car that costs more than $2 million. TodayLaunch is a super-fast social media dashboard that is free.

Twitter gives us the tools to make our searches specific (and useful).

Monitoring Twitter for mentions of our brand is just one way to keep tabs on what people are saying on Twitter. People talk about or to us indirectly, too, in other ways than using @OurBrandName. How do we find these other mentions of our brand? Generic too-broad searches won’t work; we can’t (and won’t) spend the time to sift through it all each day. Luckily, Twitter gives us the tools to be very specific about our searches on its network.

For example, you might want to set up a search that takes into account:

1. Key People. These are the Twitter users that are important to the industry or topic at hand. Rather than our entire Twitter feed of all followers, we can specify those we want to monitor.
2. Brand Sentiment. Are customers saying positive or negative things about our brand on Twitter? There are several ways we can track that.
3. Competitor Conversation. Find out what people are saying to our competitors on Twitter. We might learn something, and we might find the opportunity to connect with people who are dissatisfied with our competitor’s service or product.
4. Product Names. Monitoring mentions of specific products or services is important to any brand with such offerings.
5. Geographic Location. Twitter allows us to find Tweets sent in a defined geographic location. For example, if someone Tweets and wonders where a good pizza place is, we could respond if we are nearby (and selling pizza, of course).

Setting Up Your Twitter Monitor

Twitter provides a listing of their search operators. These operators let us refine our searches and return specific results.

Using TodayLaunch, we can set up monitors based on a topic or category, and fill it with as whatever number of searches are needed to flesh out the monitor. As with any monitor, we’ll give it a relevant name that tells us what kind of search results we can expect to find in it.

Give the TodayLaunch monitor a useful name.

Next, we decide what we are looking for, i.e. what kind of searches we’re going to use.

In the example below (from:RealCapnCrunch), we only want to return the Tweets written by the specific Twitter user RealCapnCrunch. If we’d used @RealCapnCrunch, we’d have returned Tweets said about or too the user instead.

We’re going to add any tweets from the user “RealCapnCrunch” – anything they say, we’ll have in our monitor.

Setting up a TodayLaunch monitor with several from:TwitterUser searches mimics the creation of a Twitter list. We create a topic-specific group where we easily follow the Tweets they publish. This makes it easy to share and Retweet relevant content.

This monitor will return all the Tweets of these Cereal Movers and Shakers.

Remember, our monitor is based on a topic, so we might include several different kinds of searches in one monitor. For example, a monitor for complete tracking of our brand might include:

• mybrand :)
• mybrand :(
• #mybrand
• @mybrandTwitterName
• to:mybrandTwitterName

It’s time for an easy way to find and share great content with your fans and customers.

Our audience wants to hear someone else sing a song once in a while.

It’s true.

They bought tickets to hear us, sure, but an opening band and intermission sounds pretty good after a while.

We’ve already learned how to monitor our brand, and we know our blog and our social media should contain a great mix of content. Now we have to learn to share the spotlight by sharing the content of others.

How Do I Find Content To Share?

We can find content in three ways:

1. RSS feeds
2. Online searches
3. Social Media

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are syndicated content from websites and blogs. We can use a feed reader to categorize different feeds to make it easy to organize large amounts of related content. RSS feeds are the best way to get consistent content, since we are vetting which sites we want to gather feeds from and make sure the quality is high.

Online Searches

Online searches are how we find content, including breaking news, broad swaths based on a topic, and even those blogs and sites we eventually grab an RSS feed from. These also include things like Google Alerts, an automated way to perform a broad online search on a regular basis.

Social Media

Within social media, we find content. On Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ we have already built a steady supply of content in our news feeds and streams based on people and subjects that interest us. We discover content that they have shared with us.

Giving can be the quickest and most honest way to attract the world’s attention. — Russell Simmons quotes

How Do I Share It?

It’s easy enough to share content that’s in our news feed or stream on a social network, but most of us are using social media management tools, like TodayLaunch, and so we don’t always interact with the networks in a way that allows us to do that. Where does that leave us?

• We can visit every social network multiple times a day.
• We can have our inbox flooded with countless Google alerts.
• We can spend hours performing online searches and sifting through the results for content.
• We can slog through our RSS reader, and manually copy and paste content into each social network.

That’s going to take some work. There is a better option:

• We can use the same multiple-network social media dashboard we’ve been using for conversation and brand monitoring to find content to share. Easily.

Using TodayLaunch, we can set up multiple RSS feeds, online searches, and Social Media sources all under one category for easy previewing and quick sharing. We can make as many of these categories as we need.

Set up your categories and give them a name that will be useful for you.

We are probably already following great people on Twitter — adding them to our TodayLaunch content sources makes sense.

Find people on Twitter that fit the category you’re building. You’ll be able to RT their tweets easily.

Find the RSS feeds on the blogs we read. We may already have a collection in a reader, so grabbing those feed URLs and bringing them into TodayLaunch will be easy.

Make sure to use a correct RSS feed URL in order for the content to be collected and display properly.

Think of the terms we’d use for an online search to find content, or how we set up Google alerts (if we’re currently using them). TodayLaunch automatically adds the quotes around the search terms, so we simply need to type in the search, choosing whether we’ll search blogs or news.

We can set up a custom online search and set the content up to be easily previewed and shared.

Once set up, we have a full selection of categorized content to choose from. TodayLaunch lets us preview the content, and even open it if necessary, before we decide to share it.

Our searches and feeds can be read and shared quickly and in one place.

And that’s it! We can add as many of these kinds of searches or feeds as we need based on the category, and as many categories as we want, all with the option to refine later by deleting those terms and feeds we decide we don’t want.

From one place, we can take part in conversation, monitor our brand, and find and share content.

Why Share Content?

The foundation of trust is sharing.

For our customer, that means sharing our own content, but also high quality content from other sources. It tells them we’re in it for them. It tells them we’ll do the work and take the time to sift through lots of content to bring them the best information. They learn to trust us.

Finding the best content and sharing it shouldn’t have to take all day. Using a tools like TodayLaunch helps us be successful without being bogged down. We can build our audience with ease from one social media dashboard.