Social media, start by listening
Do you intend dipping your toe into the world of social media? It can be daunting at the start but most things are really, even the first time I went to a “Conversational Irish” evening class, I was worried that I’d be surrounded by a group of Gaelgoirs, talking about the “”modh coinníollach”"! Instead it was a bunch of parents whose kids had just started gaelscoil, all they wanted to know about was mála scoile and dún an doras! Social media will be much the same.
Its a good idea to start by listening. How can you do that? Well start by asking yourself a few questions, What are you interested in? What do you want to sell? What are your goals for social media?
Say you are interested in knitting. Lets look at Twitter first, goto and type in your search “knitting”. Lots of people talking about knitting isn’t there?
You can narrow down your search by adding details to the advanced search like location, dates. Take a look at all these tweets and start following people you are interested in. This will work for anything you are interested in from CFL bulbs to curling. So right there on Twitter you can instantly join into a conversation on a topic you are interested in.
Go to facebook and do the same, search for what you are interested in, or search for people who are interested in what you are selling/talking about. Of course you can also Google and see where that takes you.
Another interesting search tool is socialmention.com.It searches various sources such as Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Digg, etc to get the latest “real-time” results for your search.
Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts These can be used for brand names who want to monitor what is being said about them on the www. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and setup the alert. Google says “Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.”
So start listening to what people are saying and start contributing. By doing some research and some listening first you are more likely to say the right things to the right people…………….
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