One of the first pieces of advice you’ll find about using social media for your small business is to “listen to your audience“. By creating a listening strategy you’ll find out what conversations are happening among your customers (or potential customers), before you dive in and try to become part of the conversation and ultimately sell your wares.
A good Social Media Marketing Strategy starts with an active monitoring and listening plan that helps you learn what’s going on in your industry, as well as what people have to say about your brand. It allows you to plan exactly how you’ll enter the conversation and what valuable content you’ll use to make yourself a valued asset and not just another person shouting about their brand in the already overcrowded social media space.
The following 4 tips will help you formulate a listening strategy to hear what your audience is saying and find out what you can bring to the conversation:
1. Use Google Alerts: Google Alerts lets you get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on the topics of your choice, where you can choose your topic and have the results delivered via email or RSS feed at the time you specify. The great thing about Google Alerts is that you can set up multiple alerts for your name, company name, competitors’ names, and relevant keywords or search terms for your industry to keep up with the information that you need. This intelligence will be delivered to you regularly, instead of heading to a search engine and running queries yourself.
2. Try Social Mention: Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It’s like Google Alerts, but for social media platforms. It works similar to Google Alerts, where you can set it up and monitor your brand and competition in the social media space.
3. Search Twitter: With over 200,000,000 million users, tweeting 155,000,000 tweets a day, Twitter has become a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about topics you’re interested in. Searching Twitter is a great way to find out what people are talking about NOW, and using a Saved Twitter Search is the best way to monitor topics relevant to your brand and industry.
4. Create Surveys: Regularly polling your customers and prospects is a great way to find out what topics are of interest to them, and what kinds of products and services will meet their needs. Services like Survey Monkey make it easy to gather information from your customers first hand by asking them what you want to know. For the cash-strapped entrepreneur, Survey Monkey offers a basic plan that lets you have up to 100 responses on a 10-question survey, thus providing an excellent tool to learn more about your stakeholders.
Have you tried any other listening strategies that have brought you success in the online realm?
Kindra C. Cotton, Serial Entrepreneur, Technology & Social Media Specialist, and Jill of All Trades (and a Master of Two), channels her energies into her small business consulting enterprises specializing in brand marketing, market research, and strategic information consultancy. A transplanted Nashvillian with years of expertise with the Internet and web-based technologies, she channels her passion for entrepreneurship, information technology, and social media into being an excellent resource for online marketers and people looking to promote their brand on the web as Examiner.com’s National Online Marketing Examiner. Her flagship brand “SSS for Success (Small Business Survival Specialists)” specializes in preparing small and medium-sized organizations to take advantage of the free and low-cost marketing avenues that exist in the online arena.
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Watch the bought media’s spin on the above!