Avaya, a telecommunications firm, knew they were missing out on business opportunities on social media. They wanted more leads and to better understand their customers through social media. So they took to social listening by tracking mentions of their brand, product names, their competitors’ products and conversations related to the industry. They then began tailoring their responses to answer each comment without any automation.
They were also able to identify sale opportunities like this via a tweet –
Shoretel or Avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon?
The company responded with an invitation to an objective phone call with one of their agents. The result – 13 days later, they closed a $250,000 sale, all while growing their fan base and customer loyalty.
Like Avaya, you too can probably identify with:
- The difficulty of quickly finding out when someone talks about you, your product or your brand on social media
- Struggling with finding great content to share
- The difficulty of connecting with the right people on social media.
In this post, we will look at tools that will help address these problems.
Find influencers
To find influencers that are right for your business, you need to:
- Be able to find those with expertise and an audience
- Find those talking about topics of interest to your audience
- Be able to track their activities/conversations on social media in order to engage with them.
The tools below can help and include free options.
Search for profiles via Google
If you use LinkedIn, then you know that any search you conduct on the platform is restricted by the subscription you have paid for.
However, the majority of profiles are indexed by Google, so you could do a search on Google and find what you are looking for.
How do you do that?
First ensure that you are logged out of LinkedIn. Then use the following basic search query –
[Keyword] site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/ -intitle:profiles -inurl:”/dir”
So say you were looking for business consultants then the search query would be –
business consultant site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/ -intitle:profiles -inurl:”/dir”
Alternatively you can use the following link – https://bit.ly/Search-LI to search for LinkedIn profiles.
LinkedIn uses 2 directories for public profiles (pub and in) so you need to use those inurl elements to tell Google that you want to only view profiles in your search results. You can tweak the search query to get more specific in your results by adding positions or geographic locations.
Gain insights and connect via Klear
Klear allows you to search via keywords and hashtags to find influencers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It also allows you to filter results by skill and location and add your selections to a Twitter list for follow up.
It even allows you to monitor brand mentions and content related to it as well as engagement.
The tool offers a free plan with limited functionality. To use more of the tools, insights and features, you will need to go with a paid plan. They do however offer a number of free tools which you can access here to gain some insights into influencers you would like to reach out to.
Find people talking about your brand or industry with Mention
This tool is a bit different in that they show you people who are talking about your brand, competition, products, industry and other related terms you may wish to monitor in real time.
It also helps with identifying influencers that are talking about keywords you have entered, and most importantly, by connecting your social accounts, you can respond to comments and other conversations on social media.
You can even extract reports that track and analyze your social media activity.
Mention does have a 14-day free trial, but you will need to subscribe to a paid plan after that.
Find influencers and trending content with Buzzsumo
With Buzzsumo, you can type in keywords related to your topic or industry.
To view the influencers who have shared these popular posts:
Click on the “View Sharers” button…
and then click on page authority to sort the list by influence.
The other great feature with Buzzsumo is the Trending Now tab which allows you to view content based around your search terms. The results shown can be filtered by time frame – last 2 hours or 24 hours, by country, etc.
Once you pick a result that looks interesting, you can view the number of social shares the content has had.
This tool offers a 14-day free trial but will require a subscription to a paid plan beyond that.
Find popular content?
To engage your audience, you want to be able to:
- Track influencers and their content
- Find other content that would be of interest to your desired audience
- Find all the content you need quickly and efficiently
This is where tools like the ones below can help.
Identify popular content with Post Planner
Post Planner is really a social media management tool for Facebook and Twitter, but what makes it quite useful is the content discovery abilities. Like in the image below which shows popular quotes from the past week.
It can find the most shared content across social channels such as –
- View the most liked images in a category or time frame.
- View the most shared updates from Facebook pages you want to monitor
All of this in turn helps with sharing useful information across your channels and especially Facebook, as it knows such content has proven to be popular.
The tool does require you to sign up to a subscription plan to use.
Set up Alerts
You can set up Google Alerts for free, to stay on top of current and trending news items related to your industry or niche. Just enter the terms or names of people you wish to track, and it will pull up a list of related articles and content. You can have these sent straight to your inbox by entering your email address and selecting the frequency at which you wish to receive the emails.
Tip – In the settings for options, select “Only the best results,” otherwise you get a lot of content that won’t necessarily be related to your terms as well.
Search for hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to find content around specific topics on social media. One tool is TweetBinder, which offers free and paid versions, but the free version does provide some useful info.
Use keyword filters in Hootsuite
Hootsuite, apart from being a popular social media management tool, also provides the ability to set up a filtered view of content using keywords or hashtags.
So if you wanted to track mentions of your brand, certain queries or even people’s names, you could do so. If you sign up for the paid plans, you could filter influencers via Klout score by way of the Riffle Twitter Insights app or the Right Relevance app.
Use content curation tools like Scoop.it or ContentGems
Scoop.it and ContentGems help you find relevant links and stories to share to your social networks.
You can enter keywords and have these tools provide a list of related content.
ContentGems is a similar tool that provides snippets of stories related to the keywords you enter.
Both these tools offer limited functions for free. To use it more extensively and for other functions, you would need to subscribe to a paid plan.
Over to you
There you have 12 social media search tactics to find people and content, so you can begin the process of building relationships with influencers. Picking the right tools is important though.
For example, to find newsworthy content, Google Alerts or TweetBinder would be important. If, however, you were after more advanced insights, then something like Buzzsumo would be important.
Mix and match the tools as you need in order to effectively reach out to influencers. To help with energizing your marketing and productivity, download the guide to the 10 tools that speed up your influencer outreach.