Many businesses spend significant time and resources to create content. A campaign to promote the content generally follows.
It’s a successful strategy. But how can businesses maximize the value they receive from producing content? The answer: By knowing what topics their target audience is eager to read about at a particular time — in other words, the hot topics — then producing content, or modifying existing content, to meet that demand.
The best way to find hot topics is through analyzing the conversations taking place on social media. At any particular moment, discussions about countless topics are taking place on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and the popularity of a given topic – and the popularity of the content associated with the topic – to the can rise and fall significantly over time.
From the business perspective, not every discussion is equal. B2B companies need to know what the important journalists, analysts and social influencers in their niche are talking about at that very moment, and to filter out the rest. By generating content that adds to the conversations of value, businesses can draw attention and coverage — whether it be in articles, blog posts or social media mentions — from the very people most likely to influence their customers’ purchasing decisions.
For as HRxAnalysts Principal Analyst John Sumser writes in the new white paper “10 Ways to Effectively Market Your Business With Social Media,” “Not surprisingly, the mainstream media tends to reflect the larger ideas in the industry’s dialogue. This means that if you want to be noticed by larger media entities, you should orient your conversation to the topics that are trending in the industry (for at least some of your content).”
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Quick aside: Businesses will only get the attention they want if they are adding to the conversation, instead of taking away from it. That is, the content can’t be overly promotional. Think of it this way: Imagine you’re having a good conversation, and someone else comes in and tries to sell something. You and the others participating are going to ignore the intruder. Now, imagine the contribution was instead worthwhile, well thought-out and intriguing. The response to the contributor: Tell me more. For more on this, see our blog post, Social Conversations: Don't Be a Blowhard.
We wrote earlier that analyzing social media conversations is the best way to find hot topics. So how does one analyze social media conversations? You can’t. There are way too many discussions going on at one time.
Software tools, however, can. There are many tools that help businesses navigate these discussions, with most tracking all social media conversations. But remember, B2B companies only want to be able to know the conversations in their particular industry. All the other conversations only add one thing: noise (unwanted information that confuses the data).
That’s why we’ve designed our SocialEars software to only track the online articles, blogs and social media conversations for given industries. It does the filtering for users, removing the noise. SocialEars HR, for example, follows the people who are important for HR vendors — the journalists, analysts and social voices in the areas of HR, IT, finance, operations and purchasing.
It’s easy for SocialEars users to tune into the current discussion. The topic tag cloud shows the most popular and trending topics. Clicking on any topic will provide a list of the people driving the conversation about that topic, as well as the content being shared. Alternatively, one can do a topic search, and the software will provide a graph showing its recent trend history, as well as the people and content.
This makes tuning into the conversation and finding people to reach out to an easy task. The job then becomes tuning your content to the conversation. This could mean modifying existing content or coming up with new content, whether it is something as significant as an article submission or white paper, or a blog, or even just a tweet.
TIP: Another option is to tune your pitches to journalists to the current discussion. Knowing what is trending and the journalists driving the trends helps you identify both the best targets and to make better pitches to them, increasing your chances of getting an article placement.
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Post written by HRmarketer / SocialEars HR team member Eric Anderson.