Greetings and citations, SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King, and we're going to talk about scalable link building using social media. Follow me on Twitter, iPullRank.
So the first thing you want to do is identify your audience, and you're going to use industry demographic data from sources like comScore, QuantCast, and Compete. These are paid tools, but they do give you a lot of stuff for free. So just play around with them until you can figure out what you can get.
From there, you also want to use social listening tools. There are a couple of free ones, and there are some paid ones as well. So, the free ones are Social Mention and Amplicate. Basically, what you are going to do is you put in a keyword, and it's going to give you back all the people talking about that keyword. You can use that to figure out who your audience is because what we're going to ultimately do is get to the personas. I'm going to get to that in a second.
There are some paid tools, such as Radian6, Scout Labs, and Alterian SM2. They're really extensive, but they're also kind of expensive. So you may not be able to use those. If you can't, you can get a lot of stuff out of Social Mention and Amplicate.
With all that information, what we're going to do is create four core groups, and these are our personas. They're a representation of the four groups of people in your audience. So, in this case, we have Music Moms, Happy Hobbyists, Raging Rock Stars, and Involved Instructors. So what we've identified, we're talking about a guitar company and these are their audience. What we have identified are these four groups of people.
Music Moms are people that typically have children that are Happy Hobbyists. They're the hip mom who wants to buy the guitar for their son. They're trying to figure out which guitar is best.
Then, you have the Happy Hobbyists. These are the people that make the most content in this space. They've learned all of these cool things from their Involved Instructors, and they're at home on YouTube practicing, showing you their favorite song and they're playing it. They're typically, like I said, learning how to play an instrument.
Raging Rock Stars are typically independent musicians or even celebrity musicians. We would reach out to these people as influencers and for guest posts, things of that nature.
Involved Instructors are the people that are teaching your Happy Hobbyists how to play an instrument, and they're also involved in the conversation, talking about which guitars are the best, which piano should I get my Happy Hobbyist student to buy.
Once we have these people, we figured out what words go with these people, and we can go to Follower Wonk with these keywords and identify them. In the case of Music Moms, you can type in "music mom" and you get a whole list of moms that are into music and may have children that are Happy Hobbyists.
Happy Hobbyists, you could type in "guitar student," and you're going to get a whole bunch of kids that are guitar students. So, what you want to do is use that in concert with the Scraper Tool for Chrome. It's a plug-in, and you can right click one of the