The action of clapping is the most common and frequent human body sound others can hear and it doesn’t involve the vocal cords. It’s an amazing built-in percussion instrument. But clapping has also become an aggregated social gesture that we use in groups to express admiration and approval particularly of things that happen on stage. We tend to clap at things we like, things we reckon with.
But there are some claps that don’t happen on stage, or we are not present on the stage where they happen.
Digital Claps.
In real life, your claps are lost in the crowd, aggregated into the total sound. So are your likes and favorites if you think that way. They join a collective gesture as a sort of digital applause. A pessimist might think these new collective gestures are empty, lonely, and are a groundless replacement for the actual social experiences. But is it really that way?
Because a like is not necessarily lonely. A retweet by its very nature isn’t a clap lost in the crowd, it’s a clap that joins the crowd, but it is also traceable directly back to you.
The success of your business or your brand can be determined by your ability to be part of that crowd and essentially, know which crowd is talking about you.
But we all know that there are many ways to find out when someone is talking about a specific topic, but Brand24 proved to be one of the coolest ones.
Now, let’s say, you have the data. You’ve been listening to people talking about you for the last month, and you have an idea where your audience is and who talks about you. What’s next?
If they talk about you as a brand, you might want to join the conversation and make yourself useful, but there are a few other less obvious things you can do with all that data.
Advertising
Choosing the place where you should advertise can be a difficult decision. Every social media network has a different type of users. Or the same users but with different expectations. For example, Facebook is not the best place to share things on a professional level and to connect with people. If you want to connect with people on a professional level, I would rather use Twitter or LinkedIn.
The same with advertising. You need to understand what people would expect and make sure your ad is contextually relevant to them. Usually, if you see tens of people talking about you on LinkedIn, that should ring a bell. It’s probably the place where you should be more active and try running a few ad campaigns. Try to create an infographic about your industry and share it in your network. To be more practical, if you don’t know how to make one or if you don’t have a designer, Visme is a tool for that.
Also, the thing about Infographics is that some people might share your infographic without linking back to you so make sure you give it a specific name that you can track using Brand24.
Also, make sure you track keywords related to your company. For example, if you run awesomeveganrecipes.com, you might want to track words like “vegan recipes” or plainly “vegan” stuff and see on which social network people are talking the most about this topic.
Apparently, there is more buzz about “vegan recipes” on twitter than any other social networks.
Partnerships
So you set up your Brand24 account for your awesomeveganrecipes.com website and you noticed something. Lot’s of blogs are talking about the keywords you were monitoring, and tons of those blogs were in your niche. What I would advise you to do is to connect with those folks, try interacting with them on social media and maybe drop them a line on their email. Tell them about you and that you love their articles. Maybe they are interested in featuring you on their blog or maybe they accept a short interview for your blog. You have tons of experience so they will most probably accept. If they do so, make sure you deliver the best flipping article for them. This can seriously skyrocket your brand awareness and also build a few links. Try to be relevant, though. If you pitch the wrong people, you are most probably wasting your time.
Run Contests
The concept is quite simple and highly rewarding. Let’s say you want to host a giveaway, or you simply want to reward your most active customers, and you want people to talk about you. All you have to do is… Actually, let me show you.
Let’s try this experiment. Post anywhere on Twitter, on your blog or use Google Plus, if that’s your thing, use any social media network and post this “#gimme5bro”. I will use Brand24 to find your post and give you five months of free Bannersnack. I think the best way to prove how social listening works and how it can help a business is to actually try it out.
Find Work
Freelance websites have a huge problem. They are way too popular. There’re too many people, fighting for a specific project, outbidding themselves and creating an overall bad experience. Let’s say you are a copywriter, and you want to find every website that has a “write for us” page. Well, most people would use a google search trick and search for “write for us” + keyword. For example, if I want to write on a blog for designers, I would look for: “write for us” + Graphic Design.
Now, you will find lots of blogs and website that will accept your content but most of them receive tons of submissions daily so you might want to look for newer websites.
The easiest way to do that is to monitor that specific keyword. Every day, a rapport from Brand24 will appear in your inbox showing you all the websites you might want to work with.
How do you use Brand24? What are you monitoring and how do you leverage that for marketing? Let me know in the comments below.
Author Bio
Andrei Tiburca is a skilled copywriter, content creator, and coffee lover. He enjoys writing about design, marketing, and everything in between.
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