Making Social Media Work for Your Business

I hope that the information I shared in last week's column to get listed locally was helpful . If you liked that information let me know. Today I wanted share a couple of other “tricks” that we use at the ASU Small Business and Technology Development Center with clients when setting up a social media marketing plan.
Most small business owners looking at Social Media Marketing are mainly interested in how it can “make their cash register ring” by finding and connecting with customers. But… social media has some easy tools to help conduct market research and see what people are saying about you or your brand.

Millions of people blog, tweet, Facebook, bookmark, and interacting on the web daily. Here are two very useful tools that you use that will “alert” you when anyone posts on subjects you want to know about. For new clients we set up alerts on key words or subjects that we think are relevant to the client’s business on Google Alert and TweetBeeps. Both tools are free.

Google Alerts is a monitoring tool that sends you notifications anytime your keywords or phrases are mentioned in an online article or on a web site. Go to www.google.com/alerts. You will have to set up an account but it is free (you may want to also set up a special gmail account just to monitor the alerts although it is not necessary). You just enter the search terms you want to monitor like: “resorts” “Ozarks” “trout fishing” “Herb’s Rustic Resort on the White River” etc. and Google does the work. Every day you receive an e-mail from Google telling what it found and links to go see what was written. You can have as many different alerts as you want and can change them as often as you need as you refine your search. Here is an example of 1 of 50 alerts on Massage from Google Alerts.

Kent's Lemon Drop Skin Care & Massage Celebrates Its Third Anniversary
PRLog.Org (press release)
PR Log (Press Release) – Mar 02, 2010 – Lemon Drop Skin Care & Massage, a boutique-style spa in downtown Kent, March ...
See all stories on this topic

A second alert we like to use is TweetBeep. Go to www.tweetBeep.com and sign up for a free account. This will keep you on top of the same type of key words that are being “tweeted” on Twitter. TweetBeeps is great for brand management to see what people may be “tweeting” about you or your competition! Below is an example of one TweetBeep notice for antiques
AndCountyMuseum: Make plans to attend … English antiques this Saturday Coffee and refreshments will be... http://bit.ly/aM0Xvm

Tuesday, March 2nd at 16:02:37 • Reply • Retweet • View

Both of these tools are easy to use and set up, provide lots of “marketing intelligence” to stay on top of what’s happening in your world. Try it out; let me know what you think. If you have problems setting either account up or have questions please e-mail me hlawrenc@astate.edu, comment here at the Bull Shoals Beacon, or friend me on my Facebook www.facebook.com/herb.lawrence. If you like these two you will love one I will show you next week!