The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on the tools we use and to experiment with new ones that will help make our jobs easier for the next 12 months. These are the online marketing tools that we recommend for 2010.
Listening Tools
At the heart of any online marketing campaign is listening to what your competitors are doing and what others are saying about you. If you don’t know what’s going on in the online space, how can you manage your brand?
In addition, it’s important to know what conversations are already happening before you take the plunge and join in.
Google Alerts are simple to set up and are effective for monitoring what’s going on online. Create alerts for your brand name, your competitors’ names, and top keywords that you want to rank for in search results. In the words of Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, Google Alerts are “an oldie but a goodie.”\
2. Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is a RSS feed aggregator that allows you to monitor mentions of your brand throughout the web. You build a pipe by combining RSS feeds (Learn How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes) and then you can sort and filter what’s being said about you online.
3. Twitter Lists
With everyone on Twitter these days, how you are supposed to keep up with what everyone’s talking about? To help us, Twitter has Lists, which allow people to group tweeters by subject or theme. Want to know what’s going on in the technology sector, for example? Follow the Most Influential People in Tech List.
To find lists, go to Listorious.
Conversation Tools
Once you have an understanding of what’s going on, it’s time to start talking.
4. Hootsuite
With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple twitter accounts, schedule your tweets and get valuable stats on your twitter activities; like how many people are clicking on your tweets, or your most popular tweets for the last month.
Watch out for the Twitter for Business Handbook coming soon from Boxcar Marketing.
5. LinkedIn’s Questions & Answers
LinkedIn is the equivalent of an online business conference. Asking and answering questions on LinkedIn is a great way to build up your reputation among peers in your industry. This leads to more opportunities for someone to recognize your authority and contact you for something further.
Sharing Tools
Once you start having conversations, it’s important to establish your value to the community by sharing content and useful information.
Use Google Reader to start building a community around your feeds and the feeds you follow. Once you fill out your Google Profile, start following people, share your items, comment and bundle your RSS feeds together.
7. Slideshare
This is a great tool for sharing your slideshow presentations and videos. You can upload your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDFs, share publicly or privately and add audio to make a webinar.
Take a tour of slideshare.
8. Blog
When you have lots of interesting things to share on an ongoing basis, it’s time for a blog. Participating in social networks is like renting space, whereas blogging is owning your own space. If you have the resources to own, then do it. Copyblogger.com offers copy writing and content tips for online marketing success.
Conclusion
It’s important to note that online tools do not equal an online strategy. Before adding social media to your marketing mix, make sure you know what you want to give and what you expect to get from participating. Knowing these basics allows you to then properly plan how you’ll measure success and how you’ll determine whether the investment in people, time and technology is worth continuing. Plan so you can measure, measure so you can improve.
