The First Step is Listening
5 free ways to listen with social media
Listening means finding the online social spaces where your audience is already communicating, monitoring the conversations that happen there, and gathering intelligence you can use to better understand your audience. Because social media is open and public by nature, listening is not only welcome -- it's expected. Set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on keywords you choose. You can set the frequency of the alerts. Start with your organization's name. Set up a few blog searches - you can search sites like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Bloglines and BlogCatalog. As with Google Alerts, you can get updates of relevant results, but targeted to the blogosphere. Set up Twitter searches and see if people are "tweeting" about your organization or industry. Search for your organization's name on LinkedIn. You may find that your name appears because you have several current or former staff members using LinkedIn who have listed you on their profiles. You may even find a LinkedIn group using your organization's name. Sign up for Facebook and search for your organization's name there, too. You can also find people you know on Facebook simply by importing your email list from Outlook. Don't worry. Facebook doesn't automatically spam your email contacts. Instead, you get the chance to see who has a Facebook account so you can choose to connect with them -- or not. If you do this on a regular basis, you are likely to find that every few weeks, more people have signed up.
Bonus Tip: Rather than email alerts, you can use a feed reader like Google Reader to collect all of your listening alerts and searches from Google, blog search engines and Twitter into one place. Google Reader will also suggest more relevant blog posts based on your feed subscriptions, all the better for listening.
More on listening at http://www.socialfish.org/. |
