A few weeks ago, I published a blog based on an article from Social Media B2B entitled “28 awesome B2B social media statistics”. As part of that blog I highlighted 7 interesting social media stats and invited readers to let us know about your social media usage by completing a short survey. The results of the survey illustrate strong interest in social media. Here are the highlights:
- Size of business. We received responses from businesses of all size, although the largest responding group was from companies with 500+ employees (37.5%).
- Use of social media. 66.7% of the respondents answered that they do use social media as part of their marketing initiatives.
- Purpose of social media in respondent organizations. Marketing and listening top the response to this question as illustrated in this chart:
Since the majority of respondents indicated that they use social media for listening and marketing, I would like to discuss the top 3 ways to use social media to listen online.
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts are email updates based on topics of interest that allow you to monitor the web for content relevant to your business, brand, products or services. You can use Google Alerts to:
- Monitor your company name
- Monitor your key products and services
- Keep up to date on your competitors or industry developments
- Follow anything of interest to you ( celebrity news, sports teams, etc.)
Setting up a Google Alert is simple and free. Go to: http://www.google.com/alerts and follow the easy set up steps. You can even preview search terms on the Google site before you set up the actual alert. For example, here is an alert preview for the term: “Smartphone for business”. If you like what you see, set up the alert and get ready to receive updates from Google. You can choose to receive alerts daily, weekly or as they happen and you can edit alerts anytime.
2. RSS feeds
A great way to listen online is to set up RSS feeds. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and allows you to subscribe to content feeds that are delivered directly to your RSS aggregator or to your web browser. Many blogs and web sites offer access to updated content via RSS feeds. Here is an excellent video that describes RSS and shows you how to set up an RSS feed.
I subscribe to a variety of RSS feeds that link to industry/thought leadership blogs and web sites of interest using Google Reader. I can categorize my feeds into folders and access them on my Smartphone using the Reeder iPhone app. This app synchs with Google Reader and allows me to see the feed categories that I set up in Google Reader. If you use a Blackberry or other Smartphone, look for apps that synch with your RSS reader of choice to allow you to read your feeds from any location at any time.
3. Twitter
Using Twitter to listen online is an easy and effective way to hear what is being said about your company, your products and your competitors. There are many ways to listen on Twitter:
- Use Twitter search. Go to Twitter’s search feature at search.twitter.com and enter a term, company name or hashtag (symbols used to categorize tweets) in the search field. You will then see a list of tweets that contain the term you are searching for.
- Use a Twitter monitoring service such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite. These free applications are Twitter clients that allow you to send and receive tweets and group incoming messages. Try setting up a TweetDeck or Hootsuite account (you need to have a Twitter account) and creating columns to easily scan the tweets related to your keyword or hashtag.
- You can access Twitter on your mobile device. Some of the apps for iPhone include TweetDeck, Twitter and Hootsuite. On a Blackberry try UberTwitter, or Twitter for Blackberry Smartphones.
What tools do you use to listen online? Do you have any tips or tricks for effective listening? Please let us know.
