What’s the most important, yet underutilized social media strategy?
We answered that question in the last blog post – it’s listening.
Here are the 8 best social spots, in no particular order, where you can listen to prospects, customers, critics, and competitors:
1. Twitter Search. Twitter has a search function where you can enter names, keywords and phrases to monitor. Perform a search and you’ll end up with a stream of realtime results for the term you enter.
2. Blogs. Find the blogs from thought leaders in your industry. Don’t just read the blogs, but read the comments section. Often you’ll learn much more there than from the original posts.
3. Facebook Pages. Do a search on Facebook and look for pages related to your industry. Become a fan of the active ones and see what people are sharing and talking about.
4. Social news sites. Sites like Digg, Propeller and Reddit allow users to submit snippets of stories, blog posts and other content from around the web that they find notable or interesting. Take a peak at categories on those sites related to your industry and see what people are talking about.
5. Social bookmarking sites. These are sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Mixx that allow users to bookmark their favorite web pages. Similar to social news sites, check out the categories related to your industry and see what’s getting bookmarked and commented on.
6. Shopping and eCommerce sites. Know all those reviews that people put on sites like Amazon about the products they purchase? The information in them can be a goldmine for business owners.
7. Social video and photo sharing sites. Depending on your industry, sites like Flickr and YouTube can provide valuable information as well.
8. Question and Answer sites. People pose questions on all sorts of topics on sites like Yahoo! Answers, LinkedIn Answers, and WikiAnswers. And they get all sorts of answers in return. These sites are a good place to find out what sorts of questions people have related to your area of expertise and what kind of answers they’re getting.
One last tip to leave you with. You can significantly cut down the amount of time required to listen in on all these places by using Google Alerts and an RSS reader like Google Reader.
What social media spots do you like to stop by and listen to the conversations taking place? Let me know in the comment section below…
Related posts:
- The Most Underutilized, Yet Most Important, Social Media Strategy
- The 4-Letter Word Missing From Most Social Media Strategies That Dooms Them to Failure
- How Facebook’s Made Me a Hypocrite
- Facebook Advertising: 5 Pros and 4 Cons for Small Businesses
- How To Add Social Bookmark Buttons To WordPress.com Blog Posts
