Using Social Media Monitoring as an Inbound Marketing Channel - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Kenny Martin

In this week's special end of the year Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how to attract customers and accelerate our marketing efforts by using social media monitoring. Learning how to effectively build up relationships without spamming will be the key to your success in the social realm. We hope you had a wonderful 2011 and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This is our special end of year edition. I hope all of you had a great holiday season and are about to have a great New Year's. It's been fantastic spending 2011 with you, and I cannot wait for 2012. It's going to be incredible.

Today I want to talk a little bit about using social media monitoring specifically as an inbound marketing channel, as a way to attract customers and to accelerate your marketing efforts in all sorts of ways. Let me talk briefly about some background on this so you understand where I'm coming from.

Let's imagine that you're Minted.com. They make great holiday cards - Geraldine, my wife, and I use them to do our holiday cards recently - and they do some branded stuff. So they have searches, keywords that come to them that are branded - things like minted, and minted cards, and minted notebooks, and custom photo cards from Minted. We think about those as being keywords in their brand wheelhouse, that are about their brand.

But then they also have lots of unbranded terms, things that they want to try and capture, definitely from an SEO perspective, but other perspectives as well. So these are things like people who want holiday photo cards, who want Christmas cards, Xmas cards, Hanukah cards, custom notebook. They sell notebooks and all sorts of other things. So all those product types of searches, those things that would get you into their funnel, maybe not their brand specifically, but all those sorts of keywords, we often think about them, at least in the world of SEO, as being exclusively from a search engine type in perspective. But there's a social perspective on this too, and that's what I want to cover in this Whiteboard Friday.

So you can image there are channels, right? So there are things like SEO and PPC. People search for these words, and we want to try to come up in the organic results and in the paid search results. But then there are also channels like Q&A and forums, and blog posted content where they're talking about these items. There are questions on a Q&A board. There are questions on a forum. There's a discussion happening. There's a blog post with content that's saying, "Here's the best custom notebooks and why I like each of these vendors," those types of things. Those are conversations they might want to be part of.

Then there are the very specific social mentions. When you think about this, think about doing a search on Twitter, probably the most common way that social mentions are thought about, doing a search on Twitter for either your brand name, for people who are talking about or mentioning the word "minted," and then people who are talking about or mentioning the words "Xmas cards", "Hanukah cards", "Christmas cards", "custom notebooks", "photo cards", "holiday cards." When people do those mentions on social networks, you can see them as a social media manager, as an inbound marketer, as an SEO. You can see where those people are mentioning them, who those people are, and then you have the potential to reach out to them, and that can present some powerful things.

So these social media monitoring tactics are what I want to cover specifically. I've got four here, but there's tons more that you can certainly imagine. It's a powerful and largely untapped channel, but it can be a little bit dangerous. I'll talk about that as well.

So first off, if you're monitoring these types of unbranded terms, this is a great way to identify and connect with influencers. What I mean by ide