Is your social media strategy in place? If not consider doing a little research in order to find out what your customers are saying about you and other companies like yours. It will help define your program. We suggest you use a few FREE online tools!
Before you just start putting out content to represent your company, you will be better prepared if you start with doing research. After all, that is exactly what your potential customer would do. There are tools you can use to determine what your company looks like to potential consumers on the internet, particularly when they search for the products you deliver. Then you can mange that perception with some well planned social media content and a little offline negotiations. Who is talking about you or your industry? Here are a few FREE online tools to help:
- Google Alerts mails you whenever a chosen keyword (e.g., company or product name, CEO name, campaign tagline, industry term, etc.) is mentioned in any form of online content.
- Google Blog Search scans the blogosphere for any keyword or phrase you input.
- Twitter Search scans all Twitter posts for your selected keyword or phrase.
- SiteVolume reports how often keywords or phrases appear on Twitter, Digg, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.
- SocialMention enables you to search keywords and phrases by specific channel category (blogs, images, news, video, etc.), or as a whole, and to receive email alerts when a new mention is posted.
- Socialcast offers real-time analytics on microblogging and other social activities and identifies individual users’ level of activity. Unlike most tools, it also aims to quantify the value of “lurkers” who aren’t visibly posting comments by how often they frequent a site.
Whether your results from this research is positive, negative or neutral; that is what people are passing along to friends. You can change perception by reaching out to those that are unsatisfied and seeing if you can improve their experience. You can also learn the weaknesses of your competitors and target your advertising to address those areas that are a concern to your target market.
If you don’t have time to do this research yourself or if you need a social media strategy plan, we can help. Email or call us at (310) 791-6300 with your needs and let us customize a program for you. You will be in a better position to sell if you know more about what your target market thinks about your company or your competition. Get the facts you need to keep your professional advantage.
