by Kim Toomey, Anvil Media, Inc.
Social Media is More than a High School Reunion.
We all know we should be engaged with social media as companies try to communicate with customers and monitor what’s being said. Think of social media as bringing word of mouth marketing into a visible medium. Never before have businesses had real time access to what is being said about their products and services, and all of this content is perfect for parsing out keywords to use in other search engine marketing (SEM) activities based on what your customers think of your brand.
People are going to search for the terms that they know and use when it comes to your company, so make sure you’re optimizing your site with those phrases.
Keyword research has never been a science, but most would agree that the wider variety of tools you can initially brainstorm with will result in a more targeted and successful keyword list. Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker and Keyword discovery have been some of the heavy hitters in the past. But with more social media sites popping up with elaborate search features, the flood gates have opened.
Use the Right Tools: There are plenty of tools out there to help you find conversations that are going to be beneficial to your research.
- TwitterSearch is Twitter’s own search engine, and with great advanced search options, is a great starting place. You can look for an exact phrase (your brand) in a certain location with a positive tone, and voila! You can see what your customer’s are saying about your brand.
- Collecta is a new real-time search engine that scours social media sites as well as blogs, news and Flickr for your search term. You can filter your results if you don’t want to see pictures or news articles for example. Don’t expect these new breeds of search engines to take over the search marketplace anytime soon, but they can provide more helpful results than Google, Yahoo or Bing.
Sort through the Clutter: Once you begin searching for conversations about your company, what exactly is it that you’re looking for? Frequent misspellings are a good place to start. Do you have a store front located in a city that’s not easy to spell? How about variations of your brand name? Do your customers say Dr. Martens or Doc Martens?
While you may not want to use these variations on your website for search engine optimization (SEO), you will want to use them for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.
- Social media conversations are also great ways to determine what your customer base thinks your most popular product is. If you have a site with many different offerings this is great information to have so you can make an informed decision about what content belongs on your homepage.
- Don’t forget to consider seasonality and that the needs/wants of your customer will change, so make it a point to revise this at least every quarter.
- Lastly, look for the adjectives that are being used when describing your company or product. Do you have a “cozy restaurant,” “rugged backpack” or “time-saving software?” Chances are you’re already aware of some of these descriptors, but it is always important to check your perception of what you are offering with your customer’s perception. Use these descriptions in all the usual places where you would put SEO effort on your site, because chances are that other people are looking for a “cozy restaurant” for dinner tonight.
- Beyond keyword research, this information can also be used in offline marketing materials when describing your company or products.
Keep up with the times
Now that you have some keyword ideas down, you should also verify your information against social media tools that pull top trending keywords. These are great resources for finding “now” keywords; topics that are mainstream right now. Twitter’s rising trends are also found in Twitter’s search tool, and show what topics are being most discussed in Twitter at that moment. TweetVolume is another Twitter tool that allows you to see how often a word appears in Twitter. You can enter up to five words at a time to compare traffic. This tool is particularly helpful if you’re trying to decide between variations or synonyms of a popular keyword phrase.
Facebook Lexicon is a similar tool that pulls top phrases being used on user’s walls. One of the more interesting aspects of Facebook’s tool is that it also provides demographic data for their keywords which may help you make a final decision on keywords based on your target audience. Select a keyword and Facebook will show you how many people are posting that word in their profile daily as well as the age and gender of these users (still in beta, so only a limited number of keywords are available for the demographic data).
One last overlooked social media research tool is Delicious Tags. Delicious is a bookmarking service that has been around for quite a while and gets overlooked in the social media world because it’s not very flashy and exciting. Delicious has a “popular tags” list on the homepage. The great thing about Delicious keywords is that if you click on one, it gives you a list of related tags that are also popular. While Food is a popular tag, it also suggests recipes, cooking, health, restaurants and travel as related keywords.
There is no right or wrong way to build a keyword list for your website. As the Internet continues to evolve, be on the lookout for new ways to discover what is being said and searched for online. I recommend using social media keyword research to supplement traditional methods and tools for now. What your customers are saying about your company is important on many levels; thanks to the internet and social media all of their comments are now traceable and easily accessible.
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Kim Toomey works for the Portland-based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in social media strategies. Toomey has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns during her time at Anvil.
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