So How Do We Build an Online Marketing Strategy That Uses Social Media?

So how do we build an online marketing strategy that uses the social media platform to promote our online Social Media Approach

Social marketing Approach

Well you could use a 3 step approach which would be:

• Identify your market with Social media search tools

• Start to pay attention to the conversations taking place at those locations

• Connect with your target market by developing good relevant content

When you are looking to connect with your target market initially one of the first places to go is blogosphere, here you will find bloggers having conversations about your interests and your products. Also you will find these same people having conversations about other products that they enjoy, you could even use this as great intelligence for brand development.

Another important piece of information you will take from these conversations are products that they don’t like and the reason that they don’t like the, again fantastic market research about your target market place.

The next step to finding / researching your market is to go over to Google BlogSearch and search for the keywords you are highlighting in your campaigns. You can also put other search terms that relate to the business that you are researching

When you go to this site you will see a short listing of related blogs, if there are too many results returned you can tune the time etc to all blogs posted within the last hour, day, month. Some of these blogs will be extremely relevant to your subject matter whilst some be using the search terms out of context. The idea here is that you click through the “Related Blogs” to see if any of them are posting about subjects related to your subject matter.

When you find ones that may be related and are therefore good to keep an eye on, you can then plug their RSS feeder into a Google feed reader ( ) account and that way you can be sure to watch what these blogs are posting and keep ahead of any technology changes.

Social Media Accounts – Twitter

Twitter offers a “Find Users” or “Find People” search facility that allows you to go and look for individuals who share the same interests in the products or services you may be offering. You can use this facility to find keywords in descriptions or in the author bio section

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This another great utility that allows you to search through twitter posts to find ones that include your keywords. From there you can click through the twitter users you find in both sets of search results, and check to see if they are discussing.

Social Media – Facebook

Facebook offers a similar single search box facility; from there you can browse through user profiles, groups and “Fan Pages”. You can start by connecting with groups that identify with your interest’s or product types. Using these sorts of relationships you can start to chat and build up your online persona and this will usually lead to people wanting to follow you in many ways. All of this can get you and your brand noticed by the right sorts of people.