This is part 3 of our series on Google Reader – a truely wonderful social media tool.  This time we look at how you can monitor mentions of your brand, business, or industry online.

Knowing what other people are saying about you and your industry is massively important.  You can identify problems, measure how far your message is spreading and find inspiration for blog and social media content from industry trends.

Bringing all these mentions into one place makes it easy to scan through results for relevant stuff and this is one of the reasons Google Reader is such a good tool for monitoring for free.  We show you Advanced Twitter Search and Social Mention in our tutorial but for a full list of the best free social media monitoring tools click here.

In part one we showed you how to set up and how to bring your favorite blog feeds into Google Reader

In part two we showed you how to bring Google alerts into your Googler Reader