Social Media - Listening

As mentioned, step 1 in any social media strategy is listen. The question is how?

With so much information flying around the blogosphere and twitosphere how can you listen to all of it? The answer is you don't!

Over the past year there has been an influx of programs that allow you to segment the millions of comments, blog posts, and tweets going on in social media. With these programs you can segment the content so that you only listen to what is relevant to your brand.

Google Alerts -

Google Alerts is a fully customizable notification tool. All you have to do is tell Google what keywords you care most about. (Tip: make sure your keywords are specific or you will get thousands of alerts a day)

For example: I only want to know about the keyword "Gastown Restaurants" Now, whenever someone posts an article on their blog with the keyword "Gastown Restaurants" Google will notify me of that article.

You can customize this to just blogs, news articles, videos, etc. You can also make this an RSS feed so that you can read it on an RSS dashboard. This means you can have multiple feeds on a dashboard such as Google Reader and see in real-time new content relating to your keywords.

You can now:
-Listen to conversations about your brand
-Read blog posts about brand you carry
-Conduct market research about a new product you are thinking of carrying
-Keep an eye on what your competitors are up to
-Find content that your blog readers might be interested in

And the list goes on.

Keep posted to the MarketR Blog for other tools that allow you to listen online.

*Currently the MarketR team is advising clients on how to use online marketing channels during the 2010 Winter Olympics. If you are interested in sitting down with the MarketR team for a free one hour consultation, send us an email today.

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