17 Dec Charity Web Marketing: Prepping your Routine with LinkedIn and Google
LinkedIn is arguably the most business focused social media site out there. There are more than 300 million professionals around the world using LinkedIn as of April 2014. Its purpose is for networking, recruiting, social selling, content promoting, and generating thought leadership.
So what should you be monitoring on LinkedIn to do just that?
Company Page
If you’re monitoring for a brand, make sure to check comments on LinkedIn Company Page posts. You’ll likely find the volume here is much less than that of Twitter and Facebook, but you’ll still receive comments occasionally and you should be aware and on the lookout for those that need answers.
Group Discussions
LinkedIn members interact often within LinkedIn Groups by posting discussion questions, topics, and more to the group. These discussions offer other opportunities to answer, comment, and link to your resources when it makes sense and is valuable to the community. For example, we might see a post in the Inbound Marketer’s group that asks where someone can get a resource about social media monitoring. If we have our monitoring process setup correctly, we’ll hop on that discussion thread and respond with a link to an ebook. The best way to get group notifications and still save time is by getting a group digest of popular topics sent to your inbox.
Additionally, if any executives at your company are a part of the LinkedIn Influencer program, it’s always good to check in occasionally on the comments on these posts. Some might mention your brand, while others are just friendly banter, so you might want to leave it to the next section to give you some tips on how to streamline this process.
Google Alerts
Quora questions.
Quora is becoming the new go-to place to ask questions and get answers. The quality of the community is quite high. A person may ask, “Why did company X make Y business decision?” Oftentimes, the most highly voted answer is given by the CEO of the company. For users, it’s a great opportunity to learn collectively from a large group where the best answers rise to the top through voting.
Your primary goal for monitoring Quora, is identifying questions relevant to your business and industry that you should answer. If someone posts a question about your company and there is no representation from your company among a stream of answers, that is a lost opportunity to guide the message (or deflect negative sentiment). Add your company’s name as a Google Alert to find these types of questions and inquiries.
Quora topics
Topics are broad categories of questions like “marketing,” “business,” “books,” etc. If you are a marketer, you should be monitoring the “marketing” sections for opportunities to respond to questions that give you the opportunity to flaunt your business’ expertise.
Blog articles
You should consider blog articles just as important (if not occasionally more important) as news coverage! You should know who is writing about your company and what they are saying. Are you generating major coverage regarding a product launch or another piece of news? Is there some sort of controversy occurring around your industry? Competitors?
Comments.
What are people saying in response to articles about you, your competitors, or your industry? Should you weigh in as well? Are people liking your content or do they have feedback for improvement? You’ll be able to see comments on blog post as well as Google+ through Google Alerts.
Links.
Links make the inbound marketing world go ’round! Do the blog articles written about you also include links back to your website? If not, perhaps you should send the author a friendly note. If you created content that a blog article is referencing, you should be credited with a link.
