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Starting out with social media monitoring, most people begin with Google Alerts. However, if you’re serious about social media monitoring, you’ll want to shop around for a professional tool.
The problem with Google is that the search results are based on a variety of factors including your own search history. Obviously, if your search history is irrelevant to your new query, you’re unlikely to get any good data.
Also, Google’s secret algorithm determines the relevance and authority of links, which for monitoring purposes is inappropriate. For example, you’re likely to miss out on obscure, but relevant industry blogs, that don’t play by Google’s SEO rules…
Next, you’ll find it’s one thing to locate the information, but something completely different to get a grip of the data. How do you handle your social media monitoring search results? Not with Google alerts, that’s for sure.
So where to start?
First, define which social media platforms you’d like to pull information from. Where does your market segment hang out? Slumming around on My Space, Friend casting on Facebook, or Tweeting on Twitter?
Next, define your keywords. Say you’re a lawyer looking for new clients, you’d want to use some keywords describing your field of expertise. If he’s providing intellectual property (IP) services, he’d want to monitor anything related to “patents”, “trademarks” and “copyrights”. But he’d then get lots of noise from competitors marketing their IP services!
By simply adding additional keywords, such as “pirate”, “infringement” or “question” our IP expert would narrow in on individuals with a particular problem… That way, he’d reduce the number of search results dramatically, spend a lot less time going through irrelevant search results, and find those with a specific issue to resolve.
Depending on the answers to the above questions, you can either choose an agency to do the job for you, or try one of the do-it-yourself social media monitoring services.
Worst kept secret: Choosing the do-it-yourself option will save you big time!
If you want get down to business right here, right now, sign up for Imooty’s FREE 4 week social media monitoring trial!
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Is social media monitoring a good way to generate leads? Someone actually asked me this the other day. A good answer is sometimes found by asking a new one: Have you noticed that people often use status messages to announce particular interests and things they’re looking for?
In the ‘old days’ you might have invested in a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to your site. You could also have created a pay-per-click campaign to gain visibility, make Google some extra cash and to decrease your dependence on SEO. However, with social media monitoring tools, there are ‘real time’ opportunities to connect with people looking exactly for what what you have to offer.
There are of course an over-abundance of social media monitoring tools offering their services, however, the real work is identifying the keywords to use in your campaign. This process is indeed similar to SEO; just as you want your website to be indexed for words and phrases people use to search for your (type of) products and services, you’ll want to monitor keywords that people use to describe interests running parallel to what you offer.
For example, if you’re in the business of making designer shirts from orders received through your website, you may want to monitor “custom-made shirt”, “tailor-made shirt” and/or “made-to-measure shirt”. Simply monitoring ‘designer shirts’ could also work, but there’s a risk that’s too generic.
In this process, you may also want to compare ‘your’ keywords to those used in connection with competitors product and services. It’s also a good idea to monitor key industry terminology to pick up the latest industry trends and detect new directions where customer interests may be heading.
Chances are that you’ll find social media monitoring a cost effective alternative to traditional market research. And best of all, with Imooty.eu, you can try it out for free!
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