Phase I Social Media Strategy- Listen to the Competition

It may be that your competitors have not caught onto the marketing potential of social media. Before we build our own social media campaign we want to gather some intel on what your competitors are doing right and wrong.

We can also begin listening to what others are saying about your company by using competitive intelligence tools. Again, you are so new that no one maybe saying anything about you yet. Your Google report will tell you what organic keywords people are trying in to find you.

Here are some of the tools I use to monitor the traffic:

http://www.google.com/alerts
http://search.twitter.com
http://www.google.com/trends
http://searchanalytics.compete.com

Almost everyone uses Google Alerts. This is the tool that Google makes available for us to monitor the use of any word or phrase on the Internet. I have 15 of them that tell me everything about the topics I need to know about everyday.

The twitter search is useful in gathering intel on key words and phrases used by potential customers. Following industry leaders on their tweets and reading the reactions could open some marketing doors. I am thinking for one of my clients, Case21, school principals love to tweet.

Google Trends shows how often key words phrases and topics have appeared in news sources and which geographic regions are using them. I am primarily interested in the US only.

Try the Compete keyword destination report to see what sites come up when a phrase or key word is entered. This will give you some insight as to what your potential customers are seeing when they do a Google Search for example.

I try to ask and track where a majority of my leads come from and aggressively maintain my profiles on myself at Linkedin and Facebook. I do this for myself and for my company. Everyone in the company should be equally as aggressive in tweeting, having a complete Facebook and linked in profile.

This is where we start with social media, by watching what our competitors do.

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