To provide a quick overview, the piece focused on how small businesses can glean useful customer insights from online conversations. The next big social media leap for businesses is all about taking these insights and using them meaningfully to achieve bottom-line growth. While a lot of sophisticated tools are now available to automatically capture, analyze and draw out valuable information from online conversations, they are either too expensive or unnecessary for small businesses to invest in because thousands of people are not taking about them online everyday.
My article offered four tips to help small businesses get started without the use of automated tools:
1. Monitor - Proactively monitor by setting up keyword alerts such as the name of your organization, products or services. Use tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Twitter search, TweetBeep and Monitter.
2. Ask Questions - Ask questions to generate insights and invite feedback.
3. Distill Sentiment From Comments - Record positive, negative and neutral comments. Once you have the data organized, ask the following questions: How does the volume of positive feedback compare with the negative? How does the volume and nature of conversation about you compare with that about your competitor? What are the words people use most to describe your company or brand?
4. Plan For Leveraging The Insights Generated - Think about how you can play up your strengths, improve on your weaknesses or even implement ideas based on customer insights.
To view a PDF of the article, click here. Feel free to share your thoughts or tips in the comments section below.
