Social Media Content, Part 3: Talking the Talk

Social media is a world all its own, and thus requires a language all its own.  It's hard to expand audiences or conversation if you're not speaking the same language as those you want to reach.  The social media world is a lot more, well, social than the business world, despite its changes in the professional direction, but it is also constantly changing.  Businesses need to learn fast and be willing to adapt and change if they are to keep up.

So, businesses need to learn more than just what they're audiences are talking about and where they're having these conversations but also how they are having these conversations.  Perhaps the most effective way to do this is through keyword analysis.  Business can utilize this tool most popular with bloggers for SEO to understand how their potential audiences are using language in the social media scene.  For example, the lingo common to your business may not be the colloquialisms used to talk about your products or services.  And, just a rule of thumb, the more technical you are, the less likely you are to reach people.

Thus, you need to learn what keywords social media users are entering into their search engines about your business.  If you're putting out content that's talking about "meteorology" when everyone else is talking about "weather", your content won't come up very far in the search engine list.  There are several tools that have been designed to help businesses learn which keywords are being used.  If you want to pay 9and thus get more tailored services), two popular sites are Keyword Discovery and WordTracker.  Keyword Discovery runs searches on search engines for the most commonly entered words and phrases.  You can set up "targets" by building a custom list of words you think may be being used about your business.  If you're not clear on what the general jargon is about the goods or services you provide, Keyword Discovery is powerful enough to grab words that are close, or even somewhat related to the words you've entered into your target list.  Similarly, WordTracker researches what is being used in the most popular search engines.  It has the additional feature of being able to track popular links being used in blog, micro-blog or other social media posts.

While both of these are good investments for marketing professionals and those super serious about vamping up their social media strategy, there is another (free) option for those who are just looking to get their feet wet.  Google has developed a tracker of its own: GoodleAdwords is a mini search engine for the search engine giant. Though it only runs on Google's searches, Adwords tells you what words are popular searches, and how popular they are, much like the Trends feature, which does the same thing for topics.  So, for businesses to move from the periphery to the center of social media activity, keyword familiarity is key!

Photo Credit: Rehan Asif