Knowing how to listen is just as important online as offline.
As a brand, if you’re curious about how to craft your voice in social media consider starting by simply listening.
What are people saying about you? What is their sentiment?
There are a number of tools available to you, many of which are free; see the list below for a few.
We don’t need to participate in every conversation out there, but we do need to center ourselves on the worlds of us and our clients.
In fact, most of the top trending topics in social media are inappropriate for most brands to participate, so we try to carve out a niche.
We watch competitors, thought leaders, colleagues and watch other industry folks to get a sense of popular conversations. Some brands have a difficult time tracking themselves here simply because they have such a common name, but work through some of the Boolean tricks to track what you want.
Ultimately, the best measurement we’ve found for determining what will resonate with your friends and followers is re-tweets, comments and other forms of engagement.
When looking at your competitors or other respected leaders in the space, you can see what types of content get the “stamp of approval” from their followers. From there, you can craft your content strategy (with a myriad of other complexities that I will discuss from time-to-time here in this blog) and get going in social media.
Reid Carr is a social media expert.
There are hundreds of tools to consider, but some popular tools are:
• Addict-o-matic is a fun social media dashboard for any brand or topic.
• Google Trends to see how topics are trending and might help you to sniff out patterns.
• I fiendishly use Twitter searches to find specific things or people I am looking for.
• Blogpulse is great for tracking trends and blogs, although Google Alerts will often have this covered, too.
• Hashtags.org will let you know what content groupings are popular complete with trends there, too.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, which specializes in Internet presence management. Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Tags: SDNN
