Monitoring your buzz via social media can be a time consuming and confusing task. But a vital one – as business owners, we should know when people are talking about us online – mentioning our name or brand.

There are many programs and tools that can help and using and RSS reader is one. 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 an 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: Use 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, personal name (though with some names this may not be effective, for me – it works well as I am generally the only Kathy Colaiacovo being mentioned online!) 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. Even better, you can have your virtual assistant set it up and monitor it – reaching out to you if something exciting is found or needs attention.

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. You can save your Twitter Search right on Twitter, but when someone else is helping you monitor this – an RSS feed for all of it can work much more effectively.

Have you ever tried Google Reader before? What do you think – is it something you lover or hate – or are just confused with it? Let me know on my Facebook page.