How to Find New and Targeted Social Media Content on Business Exchange

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Hopefully after reading my blog post on 6 Great Reasons to Become a Business Exchange User you have registered on the professional networking site and are already actively sharing and reacting to content as well as making new industry contacts. Today I want to discuss one of the valuable aspects of Business Exchange, and that is the ability to quickly find new and targeted news and information for business. I believe showing you how to curate social media content in Business Exchange will best illustrate this point. And if you’re not a Business Exchange user yet, this will hopefully show you an example of the value of being on the site!

If you’re looking to find content on the web for any particular subject for a specific purpose, some of the best ways of doing this are performing searches on Google and more recently Twitter and Facebook. Social media provides a wealth of opportunities of finding targeted information, but one often has to first find and then trust the source of that information. For instance, you could join a relevant LinkedIn Group and look at what news is being posted on a given subject, but each group on the same subject will give you different results. RSS Feeds of bloggers provide another great source of content, but you have to first know what blogger to subscribe to.

One great way of finding great content has been to use social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon provides you a way to “stumble” and discover new content, but if you’re in a hurry and looking for something targeted, it may not be the most ideal solution. Sure, you can search for content by keyword, but there is no way to sort through dates to understand if the content is new or old.

Delicious, in that aspect, is better in that not only does it allow you to search through everyone’s “tags” or keywords associated with information on blog posts and bookmarked websites, we can now do a search on bookmarks that were posted in the last day, 12 hours, 4 hours, 1 hour, 15 minutes…all the way down to 5 minutes! The problem with Delicious, though, is also the reason why it’s great: all tags are user-generated. This means that there are separate tags, and thus separate searches that must be made, for a simple term like “social media” (hint: “socialmedia” will yield you far better results).

Now comes Business Exchange, which you should already know is one of my favorite 6 social media sites for B2B social media marketing. The beauty of Business Exchange, from a content-searching perspective, is that information is not only up-to-date but in that it is rationally categorized. Remember, Business Exchange is run by the folks at Bloomberg, so they understand the need to organize the information into rational categories for easy consumption, just like we are reading the newspaper or the latest edition of Business Week.

I focus on targeted social media content for this blog post, so let’s look at the different categories that Business Exchange provides us for finding social media content: (I have included the term “Social” to show you additional content)

As you can see, if you had a particular interest in finding information on not just “social media” but more targeted information such as the latest news on “social media analytics,” the category already exists and relevant content is there for you to find as well as share. The above list is by no means comprehensive in that there are additional categories for the different social media channels (Facebook and Twitter actually have multiple categories), but you already see how fundamentally different the content is structured when compared to all of the other social media sites.

The other important factor is in finding new content, and once again Business Exchange delivers. Every category has information divided up by the following tabs:

In most cases, just looking at the most active listings that are being viewed and reacted to by other professionals will provide you new and targeted content. Choosing the other tabs such as News, Blogs, and Reference will display additional news and information.

If there was any room for improvement on Business Exchange, it would not be in the platform itself, but in the number of users and thus volume of submitted news and blog posts that is available. Every user generated content derived website has the same challenge in that its value is only as big as we join and actually contribute to the site. There are no official numbers out, but my hunch is that Business Exchange, being newer, may not have as many users as Delicious and StumbleUpon. That is one of the purposes for this blog post, to get you to hopefully join and contribute to make _our_ Business Exchange an even better site!

Republished with author's permission from original post.

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