Tag : target audience

  • 15 Paid Monitoring Tools That May Be Worth Every Penny

    Posted Sep 24th, 2010 By in Business, Internet Marketing, Social Media With | 11 Comments

    You’ve heard social media gurus say that you must listen online before getting involved with social media, but you don’t understand what that means.  So, what does it mean to “Listen” in social media? To listen also means to monitor, to lurk, or to observe what is going on online because it is essential to do your homework before you leap.

    A couple months ago, I listed 25 monitoring tools that will not cost you a penny; however, there are tons more that may be worth including into your budget.  Below are 15 monitoring tools that have a price, but will help you ensure that nothing online will escape your radar.  They are listed in no particular order.

    Radian6: One of the most comprehensive tools out there, Radian6 allows you to listen in on conversations that involve you and gives you the opportunity to put the information into quantitative formats, which allow you to create an action plan to improve your strategy.

    Visible: This platform comes in at the higher end of the spectrum of social media monitoring services in both price and functionality. Get not only updated trends on online conversations, TruCast will make you aware of all the influencers that people listen to when looking for new brands to try out. It also offers very strong customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities.

    Trackur: One of the more affordable social media monitoring solutions. Trackur provides conversation trending, email alerts, custom filters, a nifty AJAX dashboard and the ability to monitor brands, execs, employees and competitors. (more…)

  • 25 Monitoring Tools That Will Not Cost You a Penny

    Posted Jul 6th, 2010 By in Business, Internet Marketing, Social Media With | 5 Comments

    Your brand, industry, and competitors are being discussed online whether you use social media or not. Actively monitoring what people are saying about you, your brand, your industry, and your competitors has many benefits, including protecting your brand reputation, discovering what customers want and need, learning of new opportunities, staying on top of competition, avoiding disasters, and measuring ROI.

    Below are 25 monitoring tools that won’t cost you anything to use, and will help you gain a wealth of knowledge about your brand, influencers, prospects, customers, competitors, and much more.

    1. Backtype – Get alerts of where your competitors are promoting their website and who they are interacting with.
    2. Bit.ly – Shorten and track how many clicked on and retweeted your links.
    3. BlogPulse – Get data from blogs, news posts and other online content that include you or your competitors in the conversation.
    4. BoardTracker – Search forums and discussion boards or set up alerts that will tell you when and how often people mention a particular search term.
    5. DomainTools – Get a report on a website’s domain information.
    6. Google Alerts – Set up email alerts of target keywords or phrases that are important to you, your brand, and industry.
    7. Google Analytics – See where your website traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited, what keywords are being used to find you, etc.
    8. Google Video – Find videos on a specific topic, competitor videos, etc.
    9. Jodange – Track consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
    10. Klout – Measure who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.
    11. Knowem – Check and reserve your brand, product, personal name or username on social media websites.
    12. Monitter – Find out what people are saying in real-time on Twitter.
    13. Oodle – Discover competitors’ plans for the future by monitoring the types of jobs they post online.
    14. Quarkbase – See traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity about websites.
    15. SEO for Firefox – Find out a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, if it’s listed in certain directories etc.
    16. SEOPro Link Checker – Find out which sites link back to your website as well as your competitors’ sites.
    17. SocialMention – Check and get alerts on what people are saying about a term across different blogs and social outlets.
    18. Technorati – Find industry bloggers, influencers, and monitor who mentions you or your competitors in the blogosphere.
    19. Trendrr – Find out how your brand or product is trending in real time compared to others.
    20. Tweetburner – Shorten and track URLs on Twitter and Friendfeed.
    21. Twendz – Track conversation and user sentiment on Twitter in real-time.
    22. Twinfluence – Measure the combined influence of tweeps and their followers.
    23. Twitter Search – Using keywords and phrases, search what people have discussed on Twitter.
    24. Xinu – Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics
    25. Yahoo Site Explorer – Discover who is linking to you and your competitors.

    Of course, it does not stop with these. There are hundreds of tools out there! In another blog post, I will discuss the paid monitoring tools.

    What tools do you use? Which free tools did I miss?

  • 7 Mistakes That Can Kill Your Social Media Marketing

    Posted Jun 14th, 2010 By in Social Media, Social Networking With | 2 Comments

    Mirna wrote a list of 50 social media mistakes, so I thought it would be a good idea to elaborate on some of them in this guest post.

    Every nine out of ten online buyers visit social media websites before buying anything and around 50% of them take decisions under the influence of information they get from these social media websites. In a current market scenario where social media websites are influencing the 50% purchase decisions it has become impossible for business owners to ignore the power of social media. social-media-mistakes

    Although, building your business presence on social media is not a rocket science but still here are seven mistakes which can turn your entire social media marketing efforts in to disaster if not taken care of.

    1) Promoting without a plan – Time and again we see business owners who have no idea of what they to want to achieve from these social media websites. They join them just without a plan which makes their social media campaign like fishing in dark.  Like any other marketing, you must have an action plan for your social media efforts too which will contain the objectives you want to accomplish, the resources and time you have.

    2) Having Incomplete Profiles – Nothing will frustrate your target audience more than your incomplete profile. Leaving your profile partly filled not only creates communication problem between you and your target audience but also makes you look unprofessional. Make sure that your profile is complete – have your image and correct contact information.

    3) Start selling from Day One – It’s true that you have joined social media websites to promote your own brand but social media websites don’t work in that way. Promoting your products from day one will only get you marked as spammer and shunned from the community.

    4) Using same strategy everywhere – Every social media website is different. All have their own ecosystem i.e.  It might be possible that the strategy which is very effective on twitter could never see the light of the day on Facebook. Customize your strategy according to social media websites. Using same strategy everywhere will limit your success.

    5) Not thinking before speaking – Although, social media is a platform where everyone can express his/her opinions freely. But when it comes to using the platform for marketing purposes you must think twice before saying anything. Avoid giving opinions on political or controversial issues from your business account as it may attract the unwanted attention.

    6) Not being consistent – Every social media profile you create is a part of your brand that represents your company on that particular site. Hence being inconsistent in updating your social media profiles and disappearing from the community not only creates a bad experience for your target audience on these sites but also affects your brand in a negative way.

    7) Not measuring results – Well you would never come to know if you are on the right track or not in case you are not going to measure the results. And to measure results, you must have predefined goals (remember point one). Start your social media campaign only after you’ve decided what you want to accomplish from these social media websites and what metrics you are going to use.

    So these are the seven mistakes which you should avoid during your media campaign. Do you know of any other which you would like to add to the list?

    Guest Author: Roger is working for Fortepromo promotional products, a promotional tote bags company based in Minnesota.

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