Page 60 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Monitoring social networks

You probably want to observe what your customers are doing on the various social
networks. That’s a little harder to do because most social networks are closed
gardens, meaning that except for the public profile pages (a very small percentage
of all the pages on the network), you can’t search them with external tools, and
typically, after you log in, you can’t search the universe of activity on them. How-
ever, what you can do is search and follow the pages, profiles, groups, and appli-
cations created by your competitors. Keep in mind that some users hide their
profiles, so you won’t be able to track them. To search the Facebook public pages,
log in to Facebook and type the search query in the search bar in the header.

Tracking competitor websites

Look at the social media efforts that may reside on your competitors’ websites.
Often, those efforts are promoted or anchored in the company website or
company-sponsored microsite through links. In fact, many of your competitors
probably have (as they should) corporate blogs and Twitter accounts. (Start track-
ing those directly, too.)

Researching Your Competitors’

Campaign Support

Practically every marketing campaign today has a social media component to it.
As you see a competitor launch a major marketing campaign, scan the web and the
competitor’s website for that campaign’s digital and social components. The
social activity surrounding the campaign (elsewhere on the web) gives you a sense
of how successful it is and how much it helps the brand. Also, watch prominent
bloggers in that product category: They may be part of an outreach program and
could be promoting the campaign.

Conducting qualitative research

Using the free tools and observing competitor activity is all well and good. But
more often than not, you need to conduct qualitative research that doesn’t just tell
you what your consumers are doing, but also the goals, needs, and aspirations
that drive their behavior. Here, there’s good news and bad news.

44 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing