I Am Listening

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The immortal words of Dr Frasier Crane have some bearing on boosting the effectiveness of your social media marketing.

We need to know two basic things:

• where our customers are and 
• what they are saying?

Convince and Convert's Jae Baer suggests four ways of discovering if your existing customers are active in social media.

The first idea is to deploy good old fashioned espionage using modern digital tools.  Simply by providing your customer's email addresses to companies such as Flotown or Rapleaf is all that is required for them to data mine the  figure out which and how many of customers are on social networks, their preferences and other marketing details.  Your may also be interested to track you own digital footprint with Rapleaf.

Secondly (and one of the simplest methods) simply ask them and ensure that all of your lead generation forms and opportunities ask them about their social media habits.

Thirdly if you are using email platforms make sure that you are using tools that allow the recipient to recommend to others. Embedding third party code from platforms such as AddThis is one such option if the email solution itself does not provide the required functionality.  Simply run reports to discover which of your subscribers clicked your Twitter link and/or shared content on Facebook.

Finally Jae recommends "Gmail Stalking" as the two main social networks, Twitter and Facebook (and others) have "functionality that allows you to see whether your Gmail contacts are using the services and invite them to connect with you".

The beauty of his system is that it costs nothing and takes very little time.  Here is how he does it:

1. Create a .csv file from a list of your customers’ email addresses (you only need email addresses, not names, mailing address, etc.).
2. Create a free account on gmail.com specifically for this purpose. Don't use an existing account.
3. Upload the .csv  list to your Gmail account.
4. Next go to Twitter and create a new account using your special new Gmail email address.  On Step Two “Find Your Friends” of the Twitter signup process, select Gmail.
   Twitter will automatically read all of the email addresses of your customers stored in Gmail, allowing you to track the number on Twitter and/or follow them immediately.
5. Set up a new Facebook account using your new Gmail address.
   On Step One “Find Friends” of the Facebook sign up process, indicate that you have a Gmail account, and follow the simple instructions.
   All of your customers on Facebook are presented to you, and you should be able to become their “friend” with a single click.

So having discovered where they are, what should we be listening for?  The answer is, anything that is said about your brand, as both the positive and the negative present opportunities for you to exploit.

Suzanne Vara of SocialMediaToday first recommendation is that a listening station be established "where you monitor the conversations about your brand, competitor and industry as a whole".  She sets out what should be listened for in your brand, competitor/s and industry:

For brand and competitors the list includes:
 - Inquiries
 - Praise
 - Complaints
 - Recommendations/referrals to others
 - Mentions of: company name, abbreviations, key players, product and specific services

Industry:
 - Broad keywords that are used to describe your industry
 - Targeted core keywords for your specific services and/or product
 - Non-industry used terms – if the general public calls it something different or abbreviates you listen for that as well.
 - Industry leaders

If you are not already listening your competitors will be, so now is the time to start. Facebook alone has 500 million users, each with their own story to tell. That's a lot of potential prospects.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Four Ways to Find Out if Your Customers Are Active With Social Media (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• How Social Are Your Customers? (searchenginewatch.com)
• Listen up! A guide to Twitter engagement (econsultancy.com)