13 Truly Useful Tips!

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

If you have a high-quality keyword list, you will very likely see high-quality prospects arriving on your site because the site contains information that they are searching for.  Qualified prospects, of course, lead to fast sales.  And remember, a keyword can be a single word or a number of words that, when bundled into a phrase or one idea, constitute a single keyword — for instance, a single keyword could be “search” but also “search engine marketing”.

Though on first blush the exercise of creating a keyword list seems easy, it takes a little more effort than you might think.  But it doesn’t have to be painstaking, either.  Here’s a few easy steps to help you get to an initial keyword list that you can refine and build upon over time.

Step One: Think about your business. What kind of business are you?  Do you sell products? Services? Both?  If you sell both, are they integrated in some essential way?  Who are your competitors?  What is the “space” that you play in? (For instance: are you in the home improvement space or the pet services space or the food and beverage space?)  As you think about your business, jot down the key words or phrases that come to mind.  Don’t spend time wordsmithing or refining – just make it a stream-of-consciousness effort.  You can come back and clean it up later.

Step Two: Think specifically about your products or services. What do you offer? What about these make you particularly proud? How are your products or services different from your most direct competitors? (For instance: are they better?  Less expensive? More efficient? Delivered with a smile?)  If you offer multiple products within a single category (i.e., home furnishings), what are they (i.e., sofas, chairs, side tables, coffee tables, etc.)?  If you offer multiple products in multiple categories, list both the categories and products within each.  Again, as in step one above, capture all the keywords or phrases that come to mind.

Step Three: Think about the people who look for your goods or services. Who are these folks? What motivates them? Where do they work?  Where do they live? Do you serve multiple categories of buyers (i.e., both consumers AND businesses)?  If you do serve multiple categories of buyers, what might be the differences in their individual search behaviors?  Again, as in the steps above be sure to capture all the words and phrases that come to mind such as “bargain shopper” or “small business”.

Step Four: Refine and “stem” your keywords. Once you’ve completed the exercises above, you may have long lists or very short ones.  Both are okay.  Using Microsoft Word or Excel, or the equivalent Google Docs, sort your lists so you can see similarities grouped together.  Then, go through your lists and make sure each keyword or phrase makes sense, and represents something a regular person (with respect to the space you play in) would type into a search box.  Remember: don’t think “this is what I would do”, but, rather, “this is what my customer would do.”  Once you’ve done this, it’s time for some “stemming”.  This has to do with the multiple variations of a keyword or phrase any normal person (within the context of your space) might use.  Think back to elementary school when you were forced to conjugate verbs and then do this with your lists.  For instance, if the keyword (or verb in the keyword phrase) is “create”, then play with “creates”, “created”, “creating”, etc.  Then, add the most sensible of these to your list.

Step Five: Factor in location. If location has any bearing on your goods or services, it’s important to include this in your keyword lists.  For instance, if the apples you sell are Washington apples, that’s important.  If your IT services are located in Silicon Valley, say that.  If you’re a national service, but deliver results locally, then you may need a more sophisticated keyword strategy.  For instance, a national dating service might want to include “single women in Chicago” and “single men in Atlanta” – and for every other major city they serve.  Once you’ve considered this, add any geographic details to any or all of your keywords or phrases where that makes sense. (Remember: search engines also enable you to target your ads by geography, so if you’re going to buy ads for delivery only within a narrow geographical region, you many not need to include geographic keywords in your list.)

By undertaking these five relatively easy steps you should have a strong initial list of keywords that will help you with all your Web marketing initiatives.  Whether undertaking a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on the major search engines or undergoing a search engine optimization (SEO) effort, a strong keyword list is your crucial first step.

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