Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with social media, here’s a brief description: “media that is social”. Funny, but true.

We see so many organizations that begin with social media, and they set up a Twitter or Facebook account and tell us their are doing social media.

When we look a little closer, we can see it’s nothing much at all, and its typically “one-sided”, meaning they only speak about themselves, and nobody is engaging with them.

Maybe the reason is that they didn’t build out a strategic plan with specific goals and targets, as well as not understanding that listening is the second word (after competitive & market research) to learn in social media.

Listening to social media chatter can be done for free. But,  there are (great) paid tools as well.

We always suggest (when a company is engaging with social media), to manually learn about their space, and listen/watch in specific channels (their marketplace).

For example, on Twitter – you can search (search.twitter.com) and find out what’s going on both locally and globally with ease. You could spend 20-40 minutes in the morning searching on Twitter to discover much information about your market.

You may then decide to start following a few key people. Perhaps you download Tweetdeck and set up lists of key people to monitor. That’s a good start.

Furthermore, you’ll search in Google and Facebook for competitors and brands that are in your marketplace.

You’ll do the same for the B2B LinkedIn marketplace. And, of course – let’s not forget YouTube. What is your market doing there? You’ll quickly find out if Twitter works better versus Facebook, for example.

You should go where the fish already swimming. It makes little sense to spend time and dollars on Facebook if your audience is highly B2B centric, for example. (Disclaimer: your research is only part of the equation. It’s ok and necessary to “test” markets. Facebook and Google has a powerful advertising platform, for example).

But, all this research and constant watching takes time. Just like driving a car – if you understand what’s under the hood, you’ll be much more agile and knowledgeable when things go wrong. That’s why we recommend a manual approach, so you can learn & see better.

When you are ready, here are some free & paid social media tools that can help you further:

1) SocialMention

2) NetVibes

3) Google Alerts

4) Radian6 (paid) * recently acquired by salesforce.com

5) Synthesio (paid)

6) Tweetdeck

7) Hootsuite

Now that you understand your market better, are able to listen and monitor, the engagement part comes next. We’ll cover that in our next post. How do you communicate and connect in a natural, non-threatening way?

And, make sure to connect with us on Twitter

Related articles social media tools

• The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing (copyblogger.com)
• Does Social Media Performance Vary by Country? [Marketing Cast] (hubspot.com)
• Tools to Effectively Listen and Engage Social Media Fans and Followers: Guide for Local and Small Business Owners [Francene Mullings] (ecademy.com)

You may be missing out if you have not joined the crowd of Social Media Monitoring and Alerts.

Google Alerts is probably the most well known, but there are others. In fact, the coverage of sources is probably the biggest problem or challenge with that tool.

A company like Sentiment Metrics has spent several years designing their blog crawl, spam detection and analysis technologies. They have so far built up a database over over 20 million active blogs, for example.

In addition, they crawl all the leading blog search engines, RSS feeds, video and photo sharing sites, news networks and social media networks.

It can also do more extensive spam filtering. Not to mention ranking your mentions (sometimes referred to as “rivers of news”) by importance in terms of authority and sentiment. They can view mentions by just your region, or a certain age group or gender so we make demographic profiling possible.

Another powerful solution is Radian6, a worthwhile player for massive and detailed information about your mentions online. Check them both out!