Pssst. Listen
closely. Here’s a secret to being successful with social media marketing.
First, find out what’s hot. Then, be
flexible and fast.
The reason you want to find out
what news stories, or industry topics, are hot is so that you can join those
online conversations and expose your brand.
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Find out what’s hot, then be flexible and fast with conversation analysis software like SocialEars HR Edition! |
How important is it to identify and
join the right conversations? Really
important, according to Indiana University researchers who discovered that
messages with the most immediate relevance tend to have a
higher probability of resonating. In other words, piggybacking on trending topics maximizes your
chances of getting noticed.
Finding out
what’s hot can be as simple as visiting Google News or checking trending
stories on your favorite social networking site. But they need to be the right
conversations. Sure, American Idol, the botched Facebook IPO and Greece may be trending
but do stories related to pop culture, investing or national interests have
relevance to your brand? Sometimes, but B2B marketers will find their greatest
opportunities are often inside their own industry, where the odds of exposure,
with the right audiences, are highest.
Once
you know what’s hot, you need to be flexible, as not every opportunity is going
to fit your news perfectly. If there is some connection to your news, join the
conversation — fast! Don’t twiddle your thumbs because 1. There is a lot of
competition for share-of-voice out there, and 2. What’s hot in your marketplace
can become cold, and then the opportunities go away.
Let’s look at a real-world example, from
a few weeks ago, to see how this is done.
Since her client EmployeeScreenIQ
provides employee background-screening solutions, this was of interest to her.
She clicked on the topic and discovered that many
people were discussing (on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs) and
retweeting an article about employers demanding that job applicants give them
their Facebook passwords.
EmployeeScreenIQ had coincidentally just conducted a
survey, a piece of which was related to social media, that she was trying to
publicize. Using SocialEars, Jackie got a list of the people who were discussing the topic and sharing the article online, then connected with those contacts she
wanted to reach, and provided a link to the survey.
The next day, one of the contacts
she engaged with wrote a blog post on the survey! An interview was arranged,
and, less than a week later, an article that referenced the study and included
quotes by EmployeeScreenIQ’s president about the Facebook password issue
appeared on the widely read MSNBC and The
Today Show websites. And it took off from there. Nick Fishman,
EmployeeScreenIQ’s chief marketing officer and executive vice president, called
it “a panacea of buzz!”
Jackie discovered a topic that was hot, related
it to her client’s brand/news, and acted fast. And you can too.
Labels: media relations, Social Analytics, social collaboration, social conversation software, social influence, social media