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Have you ever searched through Twitter to find conversations about your brand, your product, your market? How about Google? How many conversations did you find? Too few? Too many? Too many irrelevant conversations? How do you refine that search to find the true voices talking about your brand, your product, your market?
One of the biggest challenges in searching for conversations about your brand on the real-time web is creating effective search criteria. Twitter complicates this even more with its 140 character limit, and when you’re using the same criteria over multiple channels, it gets even more challenging to filter out the noise and bring back only relevant conversations. Here are a few tips to increase the relevance of your search results.
- Search is a trial-and-error process.
- You probably won’t get it right the first time, nor should you expect to!
- Conversations are very fluid. A search that works well today may not work work tomorrow. Make sure you’re checking your results and trying new search criteria often.
- Your brand, product name or company name is (just) the start.
- Try different combinations of keywords to hone in on chatter surrounding your brand.
- Using keywords to exclude conversations is just as important as keywords to find/return conversations.
- If you have a name that is associated with more than just your brand/product/company, your challenge is to filter out everything but the conversations that focus on your business or market. Look at the recurring keywords in the irrelevant results and use them to start narrowing your search.
- Try different search criteria for different social channels.
- While it might be tempting to try an all-inclusive search across all available channels, you have a great deal more flexibility in searching for relevant blogs than relevant Twitter posts and can utilize more keywords. If your results are too broad, try tailoring the search for each social channel type.
- Focus on finding your target market—not just chatter about your brand.
- Find out what people within your target market are talking about (trending topics). A good place to start is your current base of Twitter followers. Use this “target market” search to find relevant people rather than just conversations around your brand or market, and then start engaging those who are talking.
- Find events that to your target market and join in on the chatter about that event. This is also a way to identify events that you may want to participate in or sponsor in the future.
- Think of different ways that your product or brand can be described and search using those descriptive keywords in your search. Let’s use a snack food with a brand name of “CrackerX” as an example.
- By alternative name or title. Search for people who want a “cracker, snack, munchie, or food.” Look for people talking about alternative types and brands of product in the market as well—”chips, popcorn, Doritos.”
- By description. Search for conversations about “crunchy, fun, healthy” with “snacks, food, munchies, treats” to narrow the search to your product’s specific category.
- By timing. Use events and timing to search for chatter—”game-day, BBQ, after-school, party, tail-gating” and more.
- By people, demographics. Look for a way to identify groups that your target market identifies with—a social object, a “tribe” to which they belong (or is a fan of). “SMU, UCLA, Patriots, Celtics, PTA” and more.
- Marketers (and Agencies), you’ve already done the homework! Use what you already know!
- Use the psychographic and demographic profiles that you’ve created in defining your target market(s) to find core keywords for your searches.
- Bring your search engine keywords to your social search as well!
These are just a few ideas to help you refine your search. Do you have any special tips or tricks? Post them here!
Want to find relevant conversations on the real-time web and start engaging those who are talking? Try JitterJam and see how it can help your social marketing efforts.
