Creating a Social Media Strategy: Listening Example | Social Media Revolutionary

Let’s go through an example to see how listening in social media works. We’ll use a ficional example of a Fred’s Pizza in Des Moines, Iowa. What are the top things we should look for? First go to Google and type in “fred’s pizza des moines” (without the quotes) and you’ll get something that looks like this:

You can see that almost all of the results are related search terms. There’s even a Google Places entry. If you’re lucky, you’ll probably see your organization’s name in the top results. There’s a lot of Fred’s Pizzas out there but it doesn’t look like our fictional business shows up.

Now try searching for your category, in this case, pizza. Remember to include the city since this is a local business:

From this you can see hopefully not only yourself, but also who your competitors are and what they are talking about. If there is a particular issue that your competitors are dealing with, be prepared to deal with the same issue, too.

Next, we’ll switch over to Google Blog Search, and see if we can find someone already talking about pizza. We’ll start off looking for someone local whom we can connnect with. Our “pizza des moines” search brings up these results:

Google blog search returns related blogs run by people who might be interested in learning more about our pizza. The Society of Italian Americans and the Des Moines Restaurant Scene sites would be interesting sites to take a look at and connect with. Once you review the bloggers that Google returns, try other blog search engines like Technorati and Icerocket as well. Try using the same search terms in them and see if they bring up someone else interesting.

If no one is local, then try a larger area or remove the location all together. Remember at this point we’re just looking for potential community members.

Now try searching with Twitter search.  First go to the Advanced Search:

Then type in your local region along with your keyword:

And you’ll get something like this:

These will be your first group of people whom you follow on Twitter.

Now automate the process using Google Alerts and RSS feeds from  Twitter searches. Keep track of news and find potential new followers using an RSS reader like Google Reader. If you’re not using Google Reader, check out this video to see why you need to. We’ll cover Google Reader in detail later.

Once you find people, listen first. Do not attempt to sell to them at this time. What are their issues? Is there a particular problem that keeps occurring again and again? Is there someone there who is seen as an expert or is the person that everyone listens to? How are they using social media? Are people talking more on Twitter? Facebook? Forums? Blog comments? All of these questions are important to answer for the next step of crafting your social media strategy: defining the audience.

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