How much time do you spend listening and reading online? How do you monitor what is being said about you and your company? How do you find out about new, exciting ideas in your industry? How can you find out about online communities of interest?

In just 30 minutes, you can set up a social media listening post – which is simply a collection of RSS subscriptions sent to your feed reader program. Creating your own listening post is one of the most effective ways to tap into the never ending stream of valuable, online information. Listening is a key component of most social media strategies – but often it is under utilized. The benefits of a listening post can be significant:

• Automates the task of monitoring online conversations and information
• Big time saver by allowing you to focus on reading information rather than searching for it.
• Allows for quick engagement with people in your targeted communities, like key industry influencers, content creators and critics of your products.

Steps to Create Your Own Social Media Listening Post

1. Content: Finding good content starts by determining what are the best keywords to use for your listening post. Start with your name – but if you have a common one, you will have to use additional keywords to make the search unique. Add in business terms; your company, competitors, industry, products and services. Use Google AdWords to find additional keyword terms.

2. Monitoring: Now that you have decided on the correct keywords, you need to create RSS feeds. Google Alerts is a good first option. Enter in your keyword phrases and choose the option to deliver your content via feeds or by email. Twitter Search can be valuable source for getting real-time content, just scroll down to RSS icon on the right side.

3. Tools: While there are a number of RSS feed readers, Google Reader is one of the best. If you chose feed delivery in Google Alerts, your feeds will already be populated in Google Reader. Start by reading the content from the feeds and keep only those feeds that you find valuable. Use Google Wildcards to refine your searches.

4. Process: Categorizing your feeds into different folders within your feed reader is helpful. Folders can be named by subject or even day of the week so you can manage your reading process. If you want to share important content that you discover, tag these posts to create a new feed which can then be subscribed to. After a couple of weeks, you should be able to figure out what is the best process to monitor and share your feeds.

Listening posts are truly for everyone – whether you’re just casually interested in something or already a subject matter expert. It is virtually impossible to manually monitor all the online content and conversations that are important to you unless you have your own crack research team. Trust me, if you don’t already have one, a listening post will become one of the most powerful tools in your social media arsenal. Let me know what you thought of this post and your tips for using a listening post.