When we think of Social Media Marketing, we think of tweeting, gaining Twitter followers and Facebook Fans, link submissions, blogging and the like. One thing that’s important in your social media strategy that is easy to miss is “listening.” Social Media is a living, breathing, conduit of information that comes straight from the minds of your customers. You want to know what people are saying in your industry or about similar products. If your brand already has some resonance in the market, then you want to know what people are saying about your brand.
Back in the day, the way to do market research was through surveys, focus group discussions and personal interviews. With social media, anybody with a computer and an internet connection can mine the web for valuable information for their business. Customers are talking on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg, YouTube and Ning, and they want to be heard! But just like when you listen to a radio station, you have to tune in to the right channel. Let me give you some great tools for “listening” in social media.
SocialMention.com is a social media search engine that enables you to find content about your business or industry in the main social media categories such as blogs, microblogs, social networks, social bookmarks, events, images, social news and video.
Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) is one of the major blog search engines. A keyword search brings up blog posts and articles that discuss your chosen topic.
Monitter.com is a tool that monitors Twitter in real time; it streams tweets as they come that contain your chosen keywords. Utilizing it enables you to find out what the buzz is on twitter related to your industry.
Social Media is vast, and is growing everyday, but it is not difficult to wade in and test the waters. There is a great opportunity to learn a lot about your business or industry, and the information you gather may be the key to growing your small business effectively.
