Highlights:

• Integrate SMM tools into your social marketing campaigns.
• Analyze the data they give you to improve those campaigns.
• Try tools that fit your budget and needs!
• Newlands recommends Alerti since it has good analytics and a free 90 day trial.

1. See what competitors are doing
2. Target competitors’ customers
3. See how effective your branding campaign is

and more! As a result, the benefits of using a good social media monitoring tool far outweighs the drawbacks. Some businesses simply utilize “drive by” social media, but this does not work. They are too results-oriented with their initial efforts and see it as a broadcast medium instead of an interactive medium, so they quit posting to their Facebook wall or quit making tweets when they don’t “see sales” coming from their content. Frequently, they simply aren’t grabbing customers’ attention. SMM tools can be used to find out what to write so that you can grab the customer’s attention effectively. In this Future of Engagement episode, host Murray Newlands looks at how to use social media monitoring tools well:

Social media monitoring tool: How can they change social media?

Social media monitoring tool use among tools like Alerti has skyrocketed at a faster rate than the growth of social media itself, and they are showing that they can have a direct effect on how businesses use social media. For example, when businesses realize that their marketing campaign does not work, they can shift gears and become more interactive or produce different content. Also, the act of monitoring itself lets them directly engage with users who like their product so that they can target them more effectively. They can then use these people’s profiles as high quality leads at which to aim well-targeted marketing campaigns.

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• HootSuite
• Bit.ly
• Twitalyzer
• SproutSocial
• PeerIndex
• CoTweet
• Twitter Grader
• Wildfire Analytics
• Klout
• 10 Twitter tools for better social networking (Webdesigner depot)

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If you have a topic idea you’d like us to discuss, please email us at sazcast [at] sazbean [dot] com or send us a message on Twitter @sazbean. Please consider reviewing us on the iTunes site or emailing us your comments and ideas at sazcast@sazbean.com. Intro Music by: Band: Tripudio, Song: Blue monday

Interview with Sarah Worsham on BSC Designer

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

One of my clients has an eCommerce site, but also has a retail location.  He felt like his efforts to post on social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) weren’t really worth it. He wasn’t seeing an increasing trend in online sales, so to him, social media wasn’t working. However, his use of social media has not been constant (and he’s still learning about engagement versus information vs. promotion). Intuitively, it may seem like lack of consistency and posting on social media may be affecting sales, but it makes more impact to prove it visually.

I plotted the number of posts on social media versus the visits that the ecommerce website was getting from social media and the affect on the number of sales (numbers have been removed, but the scale is 1 to 1):

When you see the numbers plotted visually, there certainly looks to be a pattern. When there is an increase in social media activity (measured just in number of posts by the client), there tends to also be an increase in traffic to the site from social media.  There are also lifts in the number of sales (although they sometimes lag by a month). There may be other marketing efforts affecting sales (including efforts for the retail location), but doing a visual analysis can be helpful in spotting overall trends. (Doing a direct correlation analysis may also be helpful.)

Having dedicated landing pages for specific social media promotions would help to figure out the impact of specific social media tactics. However, there still will be some traffic and sales from people who have interacted with you via social media, but didn’t make an immediate purchase (they come back later).

Marketing isn’t always an exact science, but measurement and trending information can help give insights into the effects of various tactics. Having information about how tactics are performing makes it easier to make good business decisions on how to move forward.

How do you measure how social media activity affects sales?

(photo by borman818, on Flickr)

The Trends Dashboard allows you to view and compare the most viewed (in past 24 hours) and most shared (on Twitter and Facebook in the last 24 hours) videos by location, gender and age group. It’s also possible to highlight unique (videos unique to one upload list) and common videos (exist on more than one list).

YouTube is also curating content in daily blog posts, divided into categories. I’d love to see this expanded so that there are daily posts for each category (or some way to sort by topic or category in the dashboard). Unfortunately the last post in advertising was way back in February. To be fair, YouTube’s efforts are mostly directed at news outlets.

Have you used either YouTube Trends or the Dashboard? How?

Ask the Right Questions

Seeking the right data and information requires asking the right questions. What do you want to know about your online tactics? Usually you’ll have the information to answer pretty basic questions: How many people are following me? How many people clicked on a specific link? But the real questions you probably want to answer have to deal with your business: How many sales am I getting from my online tactics? Which tactics are working best? How can I improve my online tactics?

Start with Business Goals

All marketing tactics, online or off, go back to business basics: what is that you’re trying to accomplish? Who are your customers and what do they want? Understanding your basic business goals will help you create an online strategy to reach those goals, as well as setup the right questions that you’d like answered.

Use Your Questions to Find the Data

Now that you have the right questions, figure out how you can get answers to them. What information do you need? Where can you find it? If you don’t have the information outright, are there additional tactics or strategies you can use to help you get that information? Marketing often uses specific promotions to be able to see which tactics are working, for example.  The same can be used online in order to create a series of dots that lets you trace a path from your online tactics to your sales and revenue.

Not Just About Numbers

Remember, marketing is not just about numbers.  It’s not how many fans or followers you have, or how many people click on your links or comment on your posts (although all of those things may help). At the end of the day, it’s about how much more business you have than what you had before (sales, $). Figuring out how to measure the right things will help you figure out how to market to the right people with the right content and messages.

What do you think?

(photo by Horia Varlan, on Flickr)

What do you think?

1. Lists

Twitter lists can make it a lot easier to group people and keep track of what’s going on.  I have a list for my influencers so I can help share their stuff and keep track of what they’re saying.  I also have lists for bloggers I follow, local businesses, and local people. The great part of Twitter lists is that they’re supported by most third-party Twitter applications too, so you can use them on multiple platforms and devices.

2. Searches

Twitter has a great search tool for seeing what conversations are happening. The great thing about Twitter is that you have access to any conversation (except those in private accounts).  If you’re an insurance agent, you can see when someone talks about their car accident or flooding in the basement. Seeing these conversations gives you the opportunity to provide helpful information (not advertisements).

3. Monitoring

Looking for mentions of your Twitter profile or company name can help keep track of when people are talking to you (or about you), as well as what they’re saying.  These can be some of the most important conversations to keep track of (especially for customer service). Monitoring can be done by just using the Mentions tab on Twitter, but also with third-party applications.

4. Trends

Twitter trends gives you a snapshot of the most popular keywords (hashtags) and topics in current conversations. Twitter shows these, as do most third-party applications (HootSuite, TweetDeck, etc.), and there are sites like TrendsMap and Trendistic.   Checking these out every so often can give you an idea of what’s important to people.

5. Third-Party Applications

Using only Twitter can make it a challenge to keep up with a lot of conversations, but there are several third-party applications out there that can make it much easier to filter and monitor so you can interact with the right people to build your network. There are several out there (HootSuite, TweetDeck, Seesmic), and they vary in price and functionality.  Try them all out and find that one that works best for your needs.

What strategies do you use to manage Twitter?

(photo by Official U.S. Navy Imagery, on Flickr)

Let’s get down to business!

1. Easily Export to Excel

Virtually any report you create in Google Analytics can be exported as a CSV file. You can open this file and manipulate it in Excel, eliminating the need for time-wasting copying and pasting.

2. Filter Out Specified Domains

If your Google Analytics code is somehow placed on another site, irrelevant data can severely compromise your statistics. You can easily set up a filter to exclude traffic from certain domains, or even from specific IP addresses. This is also useful for filtering out traffic from your own company, as well as companies that provide web hosting for businesses and regularly check your site.

3. Internal Search Statistics

With internal search statistics, you can see what site visitors are typing into your on-site search boxes. It even allows you to see what page the visitor was on when he or she performed the search, as well as the page they ended up on after choosing from the search results. In order for this feature to work, your site will need to include the search variable in the search results URL.

4. Funnel Visualization

Although funnel visualization may sound complicated, it’s actually a pretty simple Analytics provision that lets you see when users are backing out of a process on your site, such as placing a product order or subscribing to a membership. This information indicates what about your site (or your services) is scaring customers away from following through.

5. AdWords Integration

If your company advertises through Google AdWords, Google Analytics will provide you with data according to keyword, group or campaign. The data includes the number of clicks, displays, itemized costs, conversion rates and whether the ad led to a sale, or another predetermined goal. It even allows you to see your profit margin for each successful ad.

6. Measuring Performance Over Time

The original version of Google Analytics didn’t offer a way for users to compare a site’s current performance with its performance in the past. This has changed, and users can now compare two date ranges against one another to measure the relative performance of a company during various time periods.

7. Setting Goals

With Google Analytics, you can easily set goals for virtually anything, including sales, registration, successful ad conversions, traffic and more. When your goals aren’t successfully met, you can use this data to pinpoint and resolve flaws in your marketing strategy.

8. Track Visitor Loyalty

High traffic volume is great, but it counts for little without high levels of repeat traffic as well. Google Analytics lets you specify a date range and see how many users visited your site once never to return, as compared to those who returned a specified number of times.

9. Detailed Navigational Summaries

Detailed navigational summaries help you to see where your site visitors are coming from, be it an external site or a different page of your site. It also displays where they went next, and how they decided to navigate your site before they left.

10. Scheduled Reports

If you find yourself checking your Analytics reports too infrequently, you can schedule reports to be sent to your email inbox on a regular basis. You can also attach other email addresses to the scheduled report, and choose whether you’d like the report as a PDF, TSV, CSV or XML file.

11. Customizable Dashboard

When you start using Google Analytics, its Dashboard is preloaded with some basic widgets: traffic sources, content overview, goals overview, visitors, site usage, etc. Other useful features and metrics, such as search keywords, top landing pages and AdWords overview, must be accessed manually. However, when you do access these features, you can click the Add to Dashboard button at the top of the page and permanently add them to the Dashboard. You can also freely change the order of the widgets as they appear in the Dashboard, and delete the widgets you don’t use.

12. Top Content Pages

You can track each page of your site individually using Top Content Pages in order to determine the following:

• Page views
• Time spent on the page by the average visitor
• Number of people that leave your site once they’ve landed on the page

You might use this information to improve the pages of your site that cause visitors to leave most frequently.

13. Bounce Rates

Google Analytics easily displays your “bounce rate,” which is the number of visitors that leave your site immediately after entering it. You can also look at your bounce rate for each page comparatively, as well as how these rates change over time. This is perfect for companies looking to remove landing pages with the highest bounce rates.

14. Assignable Access Privileges

You can assign administrator-level access to anyone you’d like for your Google Analytics code, such as affiliates, superiors and key employees. You can also assign read-only privileges to lower-level employees, allowing them to log into your Analytics account and run reports of their own.

15. Site Overlay

With its a whirlwind of statistics and graphs, Google Analytics can become admittedly mind numbing. The Site Overlay feature makes it possible to open up your actual website and retrieve data by mousing over links. You’ll see how frequently the links are clicked, and whether these clicks were ultimately converted to a specified goal. This option is a great alternative for visual learners who may tire of the dry nature of Analytics.

16. PDF Exports

If you simply want to print out your reports with no need for manipulation, Google Analytics allows you to export those reports as a PDF.

17. Report Finder

This feature, which can be accessed from the left navigation bar under Help Resources, provides easy access your old reports, even if you created them before Google Analytics was upgraded. This resource largely takes care of report organization for you.

18. About This Report

Conspicuously missing from too many statistics packages, About this Report teaches you how to properly interpret the data you’re looking at with a single click. You’ll find an “About This Report” link on each page of your reports.

19. The Price

Arguably the best feature of Google Analytics is its cost: $0. Google’s line of thinking is that when more people try Analytics, they’ll see the untapped advertising potential in their sites and invest in Google AdWords. Regardless of whether you choose to pay for advertising from Google, you’ll be able to keep Analytics for free.

David Murton is a professional writer and webmaster whose company, a small orange, provides personal and business hosting services.

(image by Search Engine People Blog, on Flickr)

Setup

You can connect your Twitter, Facebook, Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles into one “identity” on Sprout Social. Connecting the profiles is fairly easy since Sprout Social takes you through all the steps. If you have more than one Facebook page for your business, Sprout Social allows you to connect them into this one identity to make it easier to get an overview of what’s going on with your business.

Dashboard – Overview

Once you have all your social media profiles connected into Sprout Social, the Dashboard gives you a nice overview of what’s going on, including demographics, recent messages, recent followers, and a social scoreboard.

Inbox – Monitoring Conversations

The Inbox shows all your latest conversations on your social media profiles.  You can then reply to them from the inbox or mark them for followup later. The inbox also shows you comments on  your Facebook profiles, direct messages and mentions of your business name — a very valuable tool for monitoring social media which can be customized to show you the information you want to see.

Discovery – Valuable Insights

The Discovery tool has some very valuable insights once you’ve set it up with keyword, people and business searches (the tools step you through what you need to do).  Unfortunately you can’t get an overview of any of these results, you need to click on each to see them (which makes it a bit harder to monitor). By monitoring the results of these searches every few days, you’ll have a solid understanding of who is talking about you and your company.

Reports – Social Proof

Reporting is one of the most valuable parts of Sprout Social.  For both Twitter and Facebook  you can get a nice overview of how you’re doing with metrics like engagement, influence, message types and demographics which can also be exported. The reports for Twitter and Facebook have different measurements, showing only those appropriate to that network. If you use Sprout Social for sending messages, you also can get more details on how each message performed.

Twitter Report

Facebook Report

Scheduling – Automate Posting

Like many other social media tools, Sprout Social also provides the ability to schedule messages to go out in the future, including automatically sending out posts from any rss feeds (from your blog, for example).  The interface is very easy to understand and any messages that are sent out from Sprout Social can be tracked for their effectiveness.

Contact Management – Building a Network

Social Sprout lets you manage the contacts you have on Twitter by allowing you to add people to your Sprout Social address book. There also is a suggestion tool to see people that you might want to follow, either because they’re already following you or because you’ve had conversations with you or because they’ve mentioned you or your business. You can also cleanup who you’re following by seeing people you’re following who haven’t had much activity lately, accounts with irregular use or people who are not following you back.

Advantages – Many

Having one affordable place to monitor many social networks in once place and get measurements about those metrics is pretty huge. The measurements that are given are also shown in trending format over time, so you can easily use them to see how your tactics are working to improve your engagement and influence online.

Trending Metrics! Being able to see how you’re doing over time is huge for social media measurement.  Metrics which provide snapshots are nice, but you have to see how they’ve increased or decreased over time to understand how your tactics may be affecting them.

Features! Pretty much everything I mentioned above is an advantage.  While there are tools out there that provide parts of what Social Sprout provides, having them all in one place is invaluable.

Price! I have yet to find a tool that provides so much information for only $9/month. You can try it out for 30 days and see if it’s going to work for you, which is another advantage.

Disadvantages – A Few

Clicks are only tracked if you initiate them in Sprout Social. Unfortunately, HootSuite offers more robust scheduling and posting features (as do many other Twitter clients), so I was not able to see any clicks on my posts.

Some of the measurements appear to look at all of your social profiles, but I’m not sure that’s the case. For example, the social scorecard on the Dashboard seems to imply that it’s a score for all your profiles, but the number of new followers is not the same as the number of new connections at the top of the Dashboard.  Likewise, are the engagement and influence ratings looking at all profiles or just Twitter? I think it should be more clear how the measurement or rating is being made.

Not all of the features are available for all of the social networks.  It would be nice to be able to see reports for LinkedIn and see contacts across all the social networks, not just Twitter.  It would also be nice to add others social networks, since Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn may not be ones that are particularly important in some industries.

There are also some features that don’t appear to be working correctly (mostly in the suggestions which is new). Hopefully these get fixed soon because they would provide pretty useful information if working properly. Sprout Social has a nice feedback system to alert them to problems and help users with problems.

Conclusion – Worth a Try

While there are some minor problems and issues with Sprout Social, I imagine that some of these may be addressed in the future.  Sprout Social has a nice support community where you can give them feedback and get problems solved. The measurements and features that are provided are pretty valuable and it’s difficult to find anything anywhere close for the price (pro version for $9/month and business for $49/month). With a 30 day free trial of either plan, there is very little risk in giving Sprout Social a try to see if it gives you the insights you need for your business.

Have you tried Sprout Social? What do you think? If not, give it a try, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Understanding How It Works

Obviously Compete & Alexa aren’t going to share their exact algorithms for coming up with their rankings. But there are some basics you should be aware of when using their information.  They generally collect data based on the people and companies who actually use their products.  For Alexa, this means people who have and use the Alexa toolbar and other products. For Compete, it’s all the people and companies who use their products (both paid and free). When either site gives you a ranking, they are making assumptions and best guesses based on the data they do have. They do not have browsing data on everyone who uses the Internet so they extend what they do have to try to get some useful information. It’s not an exact number or ranking for anyone (even if you are pretty well represented in their audience).

Using Information with Caution

Alexa & Compete can still be useful to use with B2B and niche sites if you use it with a healthy dose of caution. Don’t get too caught up in the exact ranking numbers. Instead, use the scores to compare your site to others in the same niche or industry. This still could be problematic if other sites are more popular with their users than your own, but you still should be able to get some baseline information and a point of comparison.

Getting a Baseline Data Point

Even more helpful is to use Alexa and Compete to measure your own effectiveness in terms of online marketing.  Get a baseline of your rankings before you start and then take a look at them every month to see if you’re making any progress. It may take awhile to see any movement and what you’re doing may still not show up in their measurements, but you can at least get another data point to use in your measurement strategy.

Understanding the Measurements

Whatever tools you use in your own measurement strategies, take time to understand exactly what information and data they are giving you. Figure out if they help you measure how your tactics are working and whether or not the measurements relate to your important business metrics. Data and information are also only as good as the interpretation, so once you understand what they mean, you’ll be able to analyze them for more useful and actionable insights.

Thoughts?

(photo by Picture Perfect Pose, on Flickr)

Compare Social Mention Trends

Topsy allows you to search and compare up to 3 queries, which can include keywords, domains and Twitter usernames.

These queries can be compared over the last day, week, 2 weeks or month in a nice graphical format which allows you to easily see how the keywords performed against each other.

Social Mention Metrics

Topsy also provides information on the top links in the past 24 hours with metrics on influence, momentum, velocity and peak (which would be more useful if they told you what the top numbers were instead of just higher is better). This chart can also be downloaded in csv format.

Advanced Search Operators

Searches can be highly tailored by using Topsy’s search operators to return exactly the results that you want.

In My Opinion…

Topsy’s social analytics are definitely helpful when you’re trying to see how effective your social media strategy is (especially if you look at the data over the past month). It would be nice if the metrics (influence, velocity, momentum and peak) were more clearly defined. If this trending information was provided over a longer period of time (several months, 6 months, year, etc.) for a reasonable price, it would definitely be something I’d consider paying for.

Have you used Topsy’s social analytics? What do you think?

Multiple Measurements

A good baseline will include measurements for all the tactics you’re implementing.  If your social media strategy includes using Twitter and Facebook, then a baseline measurement may be how many fans and followers you have, as well as how many people are currently interacting with your posts.

Baseline without a Baseline

If you’re implementing tactics which don’t have any measurement yet (because you’re just setting them up), it’s a good idea to get some sort of baseline from the measurements you do have available.  If you already have a website or blog, record how much traffic it is getting, breaking it down by important sources. You may be surprised to find that you’re already getting traffic from Twitter and Facebook without having a profile because other people are talking about you.

Break it Down

Break down your baseline measurement into as many metrics as make sense. Don’t just get your overall traffic to your website and blog, take a look at the traffic and conversions on your landing pages, as well as what other sites are sending you traffic.

Helping You Understand

Getting a good baseline reading on your online presence will help you understand what parts of your strategy are working and what needs improvement.  You may see an influx of traffic from your social media efforts, but they’re not converting to sales. By understanding your baseline and your important metrics, you’ll be able to identify what may be not working with your Twitter tactics (maybe you’re sending them to the home page instead of a landing page, maybe you don’t have a clear call to action, maybe your landing page needs some changes to increase conversions, etc.).

Thoughts?

(image by TinyApartmentCrafts, on Flickr)

How Actionly Works

Check out last week’s review to get an overview of how Actionly works.  A paid version lets you connect to Facebook and monitor up to 15 keywords (instead of just one).

More Measurements & Monitoring

The paid version certainly gives you more information than the free trial. However, Actionly still is not picking up my own Google Buzz posts, and the Flickr results are empty even though I (as sazbean) have a Flickr account. The News results are also empty, but I’ve noticed that Google seems to filter blog posts out of it’s news feed results (blog posts are where most of my results are).

Facebook

Facebook results are, unfortunately, very limited. This appears to be a limitation of Facebook’s own search interface which doesn’t seem to show results from Facebook pages, which should be public.

Influencers

Knowing your influencers online can be extremely important to your overall strategy. These are the people who are more likely to amplify your content and marketing to a wider audience. Unfortunately, Actionly just has a list of all the people who have tweeted your keyword, organized by number of followers, which only shows up for the first three (possibly a limitation from Twitter’s API). While true influence would be measured based on the power of the people following a person, instead of just the number following, this information could still be useful if you could order it based on the number of tweets/mentions. Then, at least, you’d know who was talking about you the most.

Overall Thoughts

Actionly does provide trending information based on keyword and source which is difficult to find in a social media measurement tool that is reasonably priced. I think there could be some very valuable information available if you had more ways to order and interact with it (influencers, for example). Actionly does provide some functionality for responding to mentions, but this isn’t nearly as robust as applications like HootSuite. While I really like the trending results for mentions, I’m able to get similar results from Topsy for free. Unfortunately, Actionly’s usefulness seems to be ham-stringed by the results provided by Facebook (and possibly Twitter and Google Buzz).

What do you think?

Standard KPIs

I was once asked by a company that needed help with their e-commerce sites what standard KPIs (key performance indicators) I thought were important. I immediately answers “it depends” and they looked like I didn’t know what I was talking about. I went on to explain that what KPIs are important depends on what it is you’re trying to accomplish.  For an e-commerce store, they probably include conversions, conversion rates, etc. But if you blindly look at KPIs without understanding what you’re trying to do, you’re going to miss some very valuable information.

It Depends

What’s important to measure for your company really is different than other companies. Even if you are an e-commerce site, and you have measurements like conversions, conversion rates, visits, etc., what if you’re running a specific marketing campaign to advertise an event you’re hosting? What you’re doing online is going to influence what you’re doing offline (how many people show up)? Conversions may or may not make sense depending on whether people have to sign up online…. So you really need to think through your overall strategy, as well as specific tactics and goals, to figure out what you can measure and what you should measure.

An All-Company Process

Amber Naslund wrote an important post today on The Discipline of Social Media Measurement, which is what got me writing this post.  In it, she says:

Your type of company and how your business is structured has tremendous influence on what you can credibly and reliably measure within the social media realm. Measurement of all things—not just social media—is a discipline, not a task, and it needs to be a cultural imperative. If you’re going to ask about the value or impact of social media and how to measure it, you need to know how you determine those things for other areas of your business and translate or adapt some of those practices.

Social media and online marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum. There are often many steps in any purchasing decision, any of which can be influenced online or off. It’s also sometimes difficult to get people to give you the right information about why they purchased from you. “I saw you online” could mean just about anything. The point is, you need to have your entire company working on the measurement idea. Your sales people may need to ask about social media (and ask the right questions). You may need to get a CRM (customer relationship management) system in place so you can actually keep track of what’s going on with your customers. Look at the overall picture of your company to see what needs to be in place so you can get the right measurements about social media (and other business processes).

What’s Possible

The measurements you’re going to be able to get are really going to depend on what systems and processes you already have in place. If the entire purchase happens online, you may be able to create landing pages specific to social media or have some other way to track where people are coming from online. If you have an offline sales process, you’re going to have to see what’s possible with your current process and what may need to be changed to get more information.

Social Media is Part of an Overall Strategy

Whatever your use of social media, it has to be part of your overall business strategy in order for it to be the most effective. Once it’s part of your overall strategy, it will be easier to implement systems and processes to make measurement possible and meaningful.

Thoughts?

(photo by stevenharris, on Flickr)

Listen to Your Audience

The difficulty with keywords is that sometimes the words that consumers use are different than what industry insiders or companies use. Make sure you’re using the right keywords for your audience so that your message and content match their needs.

First, find your target audience online. Start by doing some searches with Google and Google’s Blog search. Scan through any communities, blogs or forums that are targeted at your audience (or written by members of your audience) and make a list of the most popular ones. Look for what terms and phrases are used. Also, check out Twitter search and Facebook search to see what topics and keywords your audience is using.

Spy on Your Competition

Take a look at your competitors’ sites and look at the keywords and phrases they’re using. Their keywords may not be the right ones for your consumers, but you’ll get an idea of where to start. Take your list of blogs, discussion groups, communities and competitors’ sites and use a tool like SEOmoz term extractor to find the keywords that are being used to target search engines. Go to the sites and use SEOQuake’s browser plugin for viewing keyword density.

Check Your Own Data

Take a look at Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for your own sites and blogs. Also run them (and your list of other sites) through Google AdWords Keyword Tool (which you can use without an AdWords account) to find possible keywords (their suggestions can be very useful). Google also has a Search-based Keywords Tool which can give you some great suggestions too.

Just Ask

Still not sure what your audience calls your products or the topics they’re interested in? Just ask them — either directly in person or online. Or post polls or posts on social media asking for feedback.

How do you find keywords for social media content and monitoring?

(photo by Bruce)