Social Media Resources
networking sites and what you should be monitoring in each. Don‟t let it overwhelm you! In the
following section, we‟ll talk about how to make the monitoring process digestible and manageable for
you.
Let‟s jump in!
Facebook! We use it for fun. We use it to check out our kids‟ and grandkids‟ photos. We use it to share our love for our brands, engage in
online contests organized by various companies, or let a company know when its customer service has failed us.
These days, the content on Facebook almost fully mirrors many individuals‟ lives. People make
their personal profiles their homes for their loves and hates, and businesses can use Facebook Pages as a gateway to interact with those people.
Facebook Business Page Wall
Your Facebook Business Page wall is the „home‟ where your business‟ fans, friends,
customers, and critics can all interact directly with your company. They can post
questions, comments, feedback, or fan mail. Fellow fans of your business may interact with each other. Many individuals will interact with content your business has posted
itself.
There are three ways people can interact on your Facebook Business Page that you should
be monitoring:
A. Wall Posts: Anyone who “Likes” your Page can post content to your Page‟s wall.
Anyone! They can say good things, complain, talk about a recent experience
they have—anything! These remarks are user-generated content about your brand.
B. Comments: Comments are an opportunity to react to a wall post. Both you and
your fans can comment. Consider it a mini conversation that spurred from the original
post.
C. Likes: The classic thumbs up! If someone “Likes” a wall post, this means they like the content of that post. This
can also be translated to mean “I agree”.
Another important thing to understand about the content that gets posted to your Page‟s
wall is, the more people who interact with a specific wall post, the more “viral” that post becomes. For example, when an individual
posts something to a Page‟s wall, that action is also referenced on the wall of that individual‟s personal profile. Same goes with Liking and commenting. Also, wall
posts that receive an exceptional amount of Likes and comments often show up in other Facebook users‟ News Feeds. Let‟s talk briefly about that…
The Facebook News Feed
Your “News Feed” is exactly that: a feed of what Facebook assumes is the most relevant and important items occurring in your network. Your goal should be both to
react to important items in your business‟ News Feed and get your wall posts featured in others‟ News Feeds.
Oh, Twitter. While we love you and the benefit you can provide, the mad clutter that you produce is sometimes overwhelming, daunting, and hides the valuable information we
as marketers should catch.
So what type of information and tweets should you be looking out for?
A. Relevant questions about your company: If someone tweets, “Should I buy X product or its competitor‟s product?” you want
to be ready to respond. If not directly by offering helpful content about your business, perhaps you could point that person to a customer of
yours.
B. Relevant questions about your industry: Being helpful by answering
someone‟s question is a great way to develop credibility with that person. In the event they
need a product or service related to one(s) your business provides, they
might end up coming to you!
C. Requests for support: If a customer tweets a request for help (either directly to you or perhaps to their network), it is very important that you notice that tweet
and respond accordingly. Happy customers are key!
D. Complaints and feedback: Critics are always out there, and it‟s important to acknowledge and resolve issues when you can.
E. Praise: Please sir, can I have some more? Praise is a wonderful thing to receive! Why not say thank you? Retweet it. Save it to your favorites. Send that person a
t-shirt! It‟s wise to appreciate those who appreciate you!
F. Competitor Mentions:
Competitor intel, anyone? Other people are praising, complaining, and asking questions about your competitors, too. You should
monitor those conversations, if only for the information and data.
Now that you know which types of tweets to specifically monitor, you can create your plan accordingly.
LinkedIn
I would argue that LinkedIn is the most business-focused social media site out there. There are over 100 million+ professionals around
the world using LinkedIn as of March 2011. Its purpose is for networking, recruiting, content promoting (when relevant!), and generating
thought leadership. Let‟s focus on the latter two.
LinkedIn is a great platform for individual employees to develop thought leadership and grow a company‟s reach as a whole.
So what should you be monitoring on LinkedIn to do just that?
A. LinkedIn Answers: This section of LinkedIn is a great way to showcase your expertise.
Many LinkedIn users use this feature to request information, resources, business tips, and advice. Similar to Twitter, you should monitor questions that are
relevant to your business and industry. By taking a moment to respond with a thoughtful answer, you
could win “Best Answer”. When answering, you also have an opportunity to link to relevant resources. Did you or your company recently publish a blog article that
addresses the topic in question? You should link to it!
B. Group Discussions:
LinkedIn members also interact often within LinkedIn Groups by posting discussion questions, topics, and more to the group. These discussions offer other opportunities to answer, comment, and link to your resources when it makes sense and is valuable to the community.
Quora
Quora is a relatively new social networking site. Made public to everyone almost a year ago in June 2010, it has increased in popularity in recent months. Now with a
user base around half a million, it‟s becoming the new go-to place to ask questions and get answers.
The quality of the community is quite high at the moment. A person may ask, “Why did company X make Y business decision?” Oftentimes, the most highly voted answer is given by the CEO of the company. For users, it‟s a great opportunity to learn collectively from a large group where the best answers rise to the top through voting.
What should you be monitoring on Quora?
A. Questions: Your primary goal for monitoring Quora, similar to LinkedIn Answers, is identifying questions relevant to your business and industry
that you should answer. If someone posts a question about your company and there is no representation from your company among a stream of answers, that is a lost opportunity to guide the message (or deflect negative sentiment).
B. Topics: Topics are broad categories of questions like “marketing”, “business”, “books”, etc. If you are a marketer, you should
be monitoring the “marketing” sections for opportunities to respond to questions that give you the opportunity
to flaunt your and your business‟ expertise.
Blogosphere
It goes without saying: blogs (writing, reading, and commenting) should be a major part of your social media and marketing strategy. Maintaining a blog is a great way
to create content that drives visitors to your website. Reading quality blogs keeps you in the know of industry trends, news, data, and more. Commenting is a great way to expand your reach by appearing below someone else‟s content as well as causally introducing yourself (as a brilliant commenter) to the author of that blog. It‟s also very important to be aware of what others write about your company in order to respond properly. This goes right back to the „ole public relations playbook. Even if only to celebrate quality articles written about your organization when they periodically appear, you should know what the blogosphere is saying about you.
Make sure that, within your monitoring campaign, you are tracking relevant …
A. Blog Articles: You should consider blog articles just as important (if not occasionally more important) as news coverage! You should know who is writing about your company and what they are saying. Are you generating major coverage regarding a product launch or another piece of news? Is there some sort of controversy occurring around your industry? Competitors?
B. Comments: What are people saying in response to articles about you, your competitors, or your industry? Should you weigh in as well?
C. Links: Links make the inbound marketing world go „round! Do the blog articles written about you also include links back to your website? If not, perhaps you should send the author a friendly note. If you created content that a blog article is referencing, you should be credited with a link.
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