Four social media platforms - Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and Slideshare - are described as sources for B2B social media intelligence. Twitter allows monitoring public messages and hashtags to track conversations. LinkedIn provides professional profiles and company/industry group discussions. Quora features industry-specific questions and answers. Slideshare hosts PowerPoint presentations for sharing and self-promotion. Ethics of collection are discussed, emphasizing passive monitoring over active elicitation.
Following on to our KITs discussion, we can pick up the questions and develop our collection plan to choose our social media platform(s) where we will focus our efforts, how we will search and monitor, what and who we will search and monitor.Are we a B2C or a B2B company? Does this make it more or less likely that we will find what we need in CI.One myth you might hear is that B2B firms don’t use social media. Indeed they do.Firms use social media for much more than marketing. Recruiting and customer service are two other important applications that can be supported by social media.Individuals also use social media, so competitors employees, customers and partners are using social media for their own personal purposesIf we’re in a B2C firm, how does what we’ll see from CI differ from what we would capture from more traditional market research methods?Information will be real timeInformation will be raw, emotional (grow a thick skin)Volume will likely be very high on some platforms that give customers voice, so the collection effort will need to be very targeted
Twitter is a platform for users to share short messages with all other users and the general public. Twitter defaults to public sharing. >200 million total users and between 40 and 70 million regular monthly users (http://www.quora.com/How-many-monthly-active-users-does-Twitter-have).B2B and B2C firms use Twitter for direct marketing, though specific marketing practices will differ between these categories, All firms will use Twitter for PR. Twitter has become an important platform for customer service, Firms also using Twitter for recruiting.Individuals on Twitter! Twitter is a powerful tool to find people based on shared interest or sentiment. These individuals include company employees, industry experts and customers. Twitter users want to establish their personal brand, prove their expertise and readily complain about products and services (both yours and your competitors).
One of the interesting things about Twitter are some of the functionality that was not designed into the system but emerged through participant behavior. Placing an ampersand or at symbol before a user’s Twitter handle brings that message specifically to their attention. Others on Twitter will see the message, but the person (or company) you are trying to contact will definitely see this.The @ message should not be confused with the direct message. These messages are not public. You can only send direct messages to Twitter users who have chosen to follow you on Twitter.The hashtag is used to associate your messages with an on-going, multi-party conversation on a given topic or relate them to a specific event. This is the # before a (usually short) identified keyword. The benefit of the hashtag is that it is easy to find and aggregate all of the topics related to the topic of interest regardless of who is sharing them.The Re-tweet is relatively straightforward. This indicates that a user read something, liked it, and wanted to share it with their own followers.
Twitter’s advanced search makes it relatively easy to use it for CI research. You don’t even need a Twitter account to use its search tools. You can also create RSS feeds of your searches to basically get automated updates.When you’re developing a strategy based on keywords, I am a big believer of creating lists. I always have lots of lists for my Internet research. Lists of competitor company names, industry-specific terminology, product brand names, names of executives in mine and other firms and so on.Examples: Ethernet, Platform as a Service, IPv6Note that any given twitter search doesn’t capture everything that has ever been said on Twitter about a topic. The search is intended to give a perspective on the relatively recent Twitter stream. The basic Twitter search only goes back a few weeks, and this illustrates how Twitter is intended to be a real-time platform.
Twitter.com/companyname (example: Google, note the verified account ID)Listorious: example: IBMTwellow example: PfizerNote how to evaluate the applicability of each of the accounts in search results. Twello seems like junk sneaks in to some searches.