Do you know where your customers are? Use a social media listening platform and find out what they're saying

1. Social Media MarketingBuilding your listening platform Karen James www.cloudva.co.uk

2. Step 1: Keywords Brainstorm a list of possible keywords What words would a prospective customer use in the search box when looking for your product/service? Keywords can also be your own company name or your competitors name Once you’ve created a list of about 10 keywords/phrases put them to one side -you’ll need them later!

3. Step 2: Sign up to Google Readerwww.google.com/reader

4. Now you need to fill the reader

5. Step 3: www.google.com/alerts Sign in to Google Alerts (Here’s where your keyword list comes into play) Enter your keyword then search all or narrow it down to: Discussions Blogs News Video Instead of having the alerts sent to your email address, select ‘feed’ – all search results will go straight to your Reader

6. Step 4: RSS Feeds Do you read industry blogs regularly? Sometimes a blog will have a little orange icon like this one which means you can subscribe to it and have updates sent to your email address. Instead of having them sent to your email address add them to your Reader by clicking the orange RSS button and selecting ‘add to Google Reader’

7. Step 5: www.socialmention.com Want to find out what’s being talked about on social media channels? Go to www.socialmention.com. Enter your keyword, search all social media channels or select specific ones, click search and then click the orange RSS button to save the search to your Reader.

8. Step 6: Here’s one I made earlier! All the searches you’ve set up and all of the blogs you’ve subscribed to will now be sent to your Reader where you can browse through them and read them all from Google Reader. What’s more, every time you log in to your Reader it will have updated so you don’t need to do the search all over again!

9. Step 7: Now start listening Combined with the Twitter listening strategy I showed you in the last blog post you should have lots of relevant posts, tweets, articles and blogs you can read to see which social media channels your customers are on and what they’re talking about. You can also get some great inspiration for your own blog posts, articles and tweets.

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