How Do I Find Relevant Social Conversations?
In our last post, “What Do I Say?,” I wrote about how to become a member of the communities that you, as a business, serve. You want to engage potential customers that are talking about your markets, your products, your brands, and one of the best ways to do that is to be seen as a member who contributes to the conversations–not just one that pushes your own message and agenda to the masses.
You want to start engaging current and potential customers that are talking about your products, brands and markets, but you are overwhelmed at the sheer volume of conversations taking place on the real-time web. You search for conversations but are wading through the myriad of irrelevant chatter. So how do you find relevant conversations? You’ll find a few tips below that pertain to Twitter, blogs and some other social channel searches:
Check and adjust your criteria often. Searching for relevant conversations is more of an art than a science. Conversations change from day to day, and your search criteria will have to change with the ebbs and flows of the conversations. For instance, an outdoor gear products company that is searching for conversations about camping might suddenly be inundated with conversations that surround camping out to buy tickets for the Miley Cyrus tour. If you have created and saved a search that’s related to camping, you’re going to have to filter out this anomaly. NOT is your friend in a search.
Add keywords to focus your search. Camping might be a great keyword for your search, but it’s very general. That outdoors gear company might want to narrow in the conversations to ones that match “camping and gear not Miley” or even camping and trip and plan not Miley to focus on those people who might be planning a trip or looking for gear. Try out different mixes of keywords to see how these changes impact the quality of your results. Too few? Maybe the words are not the right ones. Too many? Try adding some additional words to pinpoint your focus.
Try following “conversation trails.” One way to find new people is to follow conversation trails. One person tweets about camping. Look at who re-tweeted the information. Look at who that person has on his/her Twitter camping list. Another person posted a blog entry about camping gear. A number of others commented and posted links to their blogs. And so on. Conversation trails = an informal community that has formed around a topic of interest–and one example of a community you can join and engage.
Try searching Twitter hashtags. Have you been curious about the little # tags that people have been placing in their tweets? Those tags are used by Twitter to make it easier for everyone to find tweets related to common interests. Brands create and use unique hashtags to not only help their customers find their content but to help others find content and people that are related to them as well. The #camping hashtag might help the outdoors gear company find people interested in camping or lead to new conversation trails.
Use your own voice to have others find you. You’re not the only one searching for relevant conversations. Post some interesting content to your blog, to Twitter, to your YouTube channel. Use keywords and hashtags to help others find you. And they will. The more you say that adds to the conversation, the more people will be interested in listening.
To those of you who did a web search on Miley Cyrus tickets and ended up here, thanks for visiting. 
