Monitoring your buzz via social media can be a real time sucker. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it’s a great tool to use for automatically managing your social media and finding out what people are saying about you. There are a lot of ways you can use RSS to your benefit when it comes to social media and creating automation to avoid time wasters.

Here are the step by step instructions to setting up your RSS reader to monitor your social media buzz.

Set up Google Reader Account –  Google Reader is free and enables you to keep up with any website that has an RSS feed. You simply set up your account and then add in the feeds.  You’ll need a Google account. Even if you already have one you might want to set up one specifically for monitoring your buzz. One account for each niche you’re involved in is usually easier to keep track of.

Set up Google Alerts – Using relevant keywords for your niche and set the delivery option to feed instead of by email, then click create!  You may  have to “edit” the created feed in order to set it up to Feed instead of email. Do one for each keyword, keyword phrase, your business name and any unique phrasing that you use on your websites and blogs.

By setting up RSS feeds to monitor the social buzz about you, your niche and business you can then check it all on one page in one glance a couple of times a day. Better you can have your virtual assistant to set it up, and check it once a day and send you a report if something exciting happens, or is  otherwise important that needs to be dealt with.

You can take this a step further by adding a Twitter Feed to your Google Reader account by using Twitter Search. Simply enter your keywords, click search, then click “Feed for this query”. Then you’ll also have anything important being said about you, or your niche on Twitter on the same page as the rest of the feeds.