Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

We’ve learned that the first step in social media marketing is listening and while there are many social listening platforms there is one you can use right now that will give you all sorts of useful information about where your brand is being mentioned right now. This tool is called Social Mention and it helps you track conversations, mentions in just about every social channel. What this means is it lets you see where you might have an audience, what they’re talking about and then engage them.

Suppose you want to know where you brand is being mentioned online across different channels (who doesn’t?), you go to Social Mention and type in your brand name and hit search. For example I did a search for hot-shot location based service Foursquare, in the results page you get mentions for  ‘foursquare’ across different categories such as blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, Q&A and networks.

You can also search for keywords related to your business such as ‘________’ and it will give results where that appears across social channels, you can then go that individual channel and engage in that conversation.

Another bonus is that similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention also has “social media alerts” which will provide daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest about you.

There are other tools just like this one that give you more specific data but come at a cost, for example Radian6, but with Social Mention you can get started right away at no cost.

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This is post is written for people and businesses who are just getting introduced to Twitter and are looking for a more powerful Twitter app to satisfy their real-time needs!

This is a question we get asked all the time and an important one when defining what tools to use to support your social media strategy.

For me it’s Tweetdeck.

I used to use Twhirl and then Seesmic Desktop for about a year or so but Tweetdeck won me over with it’s ability to let you create groups of people to follow. If I had to pick a few things that make me use Tweetdeck everyday here they are:

1. Multiple account management. I have two accounts, @jorgebarba and @blumaya so I see both of them on Tweetdeck without having to go to each one’s Twitter account. This really comes in handy when monitoring various Twitter accounts if your company has them.

2. Easily filter down to the information you want to see. Tweetdeck also let’s you add columns for individual searches. For example a topic I follow is innovation so I added a column that shows tweets of people who us #innovation hashtag in their tweet. 

So once you’ve determined what topics you’ll be monitoring for your social media strategy, you can plug them into Tweetdeck and voila’ you a real-time dashboard! This makes it really easy to filter through information and makes it a little less overwhelming.

3. All in one Twitter functionality. With Tweetdeck you can easily Reply, ReTweet, DM, favorite, email, translate, follow, unfollow, add to list, view profiles directly from the user interface.

4. Ability to view videos and pictures on Tweetdeck. You can also view YouTube videos, Twitpic photos directly on Tweetdeck without having to browse to YouTube or Twitpic which is a big time saver!

5. Ease of use. Seesmic has most of the functionalities that Tweetdeck does but I consider it to be less easy to use than Tweetdeck.

One caveat about Tweetdeck is that it’s a memory hog, over 100 MB and sometimes goes over 200 MB on a Windows 7 machine. So if you don’t have a fast computer with a lot of memory (at least 4 GB of RAM) I recommend you try Seesmic Web which is a web based version of Seesmic Desktop and a great alternative to Tweetdeck.

So there you go, let me know if you get too overwhelmed

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Here a presentation Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur gave at Ad Tech a few weeks ago. Key takeaway is to invest in building a long term web presence instead of the traditional campaign.

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“Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.” Bette Davis

The basic recipe for marketing your business with social media tools goes a little something like this:

1. Setup a blog.

2. Open a Twitter account.

3. Setup a Facebook Fan Page.

4. Publish content on your blog (A lot of it!).

5. Tweet interesting stuff (including your blog content).

6. Engage in conversation with people on Twitter.

7. Retweet stuff posted by other people so that they in turn might RT you back.

8. Comment on blogs

9. …

10…

I’m all for simplicity and these ideas are worthy of being in a Social Media Marketing for Dummies book but you don’t really need that because there loads of blogs out there spreading this gospel. Problem is they’re all best practices now, so how do you differentiate?

By starting to uncover some insights into your audience’s online behavior like where they hang out, what they do there, how much time they spend there, who they talk to, what they talk about, where will they jump to next and then asking ‘WHY’.

So what’s the first step in social media marketing then? Listening.

Listen and then talk

Listening is not the same as hearing. We all like the sound of our own voice and it often stands in the way of understanding the person we’re talking to (your customers). If we really want to understand people we have to pay attention to what they say and do and once we do that we’ll stand a better chance of influencing their behavior. Nothing new with this statement, repeated often but rarely practiced as I repeat again we like the sound of our own voice.

You need to give a damn about what people have to say to do social media properly and only deep empathy translates into insight.

You need social monitoring tools

If you aren’t familiar with social monitoring tools, here are 26 social listening tools to add to your arsenal, here’s a full presentation. There are both free and paid tools but most of what you need to get started is already on your website in the form of comments, analytic stats, RT’s, Twitter trackbacks, newsletter stats. These will provide you with some good data and information before you move on to the external tools.

I like to say that every business should strive to know their customers better than they know themselves, this takes a lot more effort and goes way beyond the ‘I want them to buy my product and shut up’ mindset most traditional businesses have. Luckily social media tools let us have a 1 to 1 conversation with customers and enables us to get under their skin to uncover those hidden insights that might just give us a new idea for a new service or product.

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The sad thing about marketers on Twitter and all these ‘social tools’ is everyone thinks that by simply signing up and posting thoughts and links that this encompasses a strategy. Tough luck!

Setting up an account on Twitter doesn’t mean you have a strategy, it means Twitter is part of your strategy because you think it suits you.

Remember the very first mobile phones? Remember when you first got one? Did you actually believe that was going to solve all your business issues back then? Probably not. Leap forward to when you got a smart phone say the iPhone, did you get one because everyone else got one and you didn’t want to be left out or because it’s capabilities opened up opportunities for your business?

And here then is the point: the capability a technology enables you to do is what you should look at and then ask yourself what does this tool’s capability let me do for my business?

It’s imperative that in order to know how to use these tools as part of your overall strategy, first ask yourself ‘why’ are you are using these tools and how does they fit in our overall business strategy?

Once you know why you can then figure out the activities that take advantage of the tool’s capabilities and then you can get to work!

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