Welcome to another installment of social media tips! You are back this week, which means that I didn’t completely scare you off with last week’s installment, where we talked about share of conversation. Many companies by now recognize the importance of getting involved in social media. However, quite a few folks have no idea where to start. To that end, a question that I get very frequently is “Where?”:
- Where should I create a presence?
- Where should I engage?
- Where should I be listening for customer feedback?
- Should I blog, tweet, engage in discussion forums, or all of the above?
- Should I be guest blogging? If so, where?
- I know I need to connect with influencers, but where do you find them?
You won’t find influencers of customers if you don’t know where to look. Your time is limited, and your decision where to listen and engage will determine the level of success of your social initiatives. Ok, simple enough, but how do I find all this out? I say… Let the data speak for itself. For example, this is how I find conversations about terms of interest to me (such as social media monitoring, customer experience management, social CRM, etc): I simply enter those terms into Attensity360, and a list of relevant articles comes up, which includes Twitter, discussion forums, blogs, videos, etc. For me, it’s mostly Twitter and blogs, so most of my engagement and analysis revolves around these channels. For you, it may be something else. It’s not enough to only track conversations about your own brand or product. You also need to figure out where people are talking about:
- Your industry and product category / categories
- Your competitors’ company and brand names
- Your competitors’ products
- Key clients’ products
