Brilliant Concept In Online Marketing Stirs Up The Business Community
What is the Brilliant Concept?
The genuine brilliance in this marketing concept lies in its simplicity. The problem it seeks to solve is a very specific, yet global one -- how to get qualified leads from Google and other search engines. In short, the concept is getting all your website mentions on Google and social media reported back to you for use as email subscribers and leads for your business. It does this through an automated process that works with some of the most popular social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. You will be able to see what keywords people are using when they search online or mention you on their profiles, who they are talking about you around the web, what their company name or industry looks like, etc.
The way you get the leads is by setting up an account with "Social Mention" and following the steps listed in this article: How to get regular business leads from Google and Facebook. The premise behind this method is that you'll be able to spot trends on who's talking about your business and running ads against your keywords, which will help you figure out who's interested in what your company does and then run targeted ads to them.
Why This Helps Your Business
The main goal of Social Media Mention is to help small businesses like yours connect with their customers, but it also helps large corporations build a stronger presence and attract new customers, which can be very beneficial in the long run.
How To Get The Leads
Social Media Mention isn't exactly a social media company, so you will have to sign up with them. You can do that on their website , or call the number below and talk to someone who can help you get set up quickly:
1-877-712-4339 SocialMention.com
Once you sign up, you will be sent a login link right away. These are usually automated emails, so you don't have to worry about missing them. Just enter your email address and password and you'll be able to get started.
The next step is to add some keywords that you're interested in that your business is associated with. You can do this by searching for the keywords on Google or by looking up the domain name for your website by going to www.whoishostingthis.com .
If you want social mentions for a different domain, like www.yourcompanynamehere, just make sure the domain isn't already being mentioned on Google or Twitter, like : http://www.yourcompanynamehere.com/social-media-mention/ . Instead, try some other variations and see what you get.
If you're using a different domain, you want to make sure the domain is associated with your company name. This can be done by going to Open Site Explorer and typing in the domain:
This will pull up a page that says your domain is hosted on "HostGator." You can then click on "Whois" and find out who owns the website. Once there, scroll down until you find something that looks like this:
You will find companies like HostGator listed below. In this case, HostGator owns Twitter accounts for a lot of people including mine ( @AdamRifkin ).
You can see on the right that the HostGator owned by "Hosted@ChoiceHOST" is referring people to my Twitter account.
If you click on "View Details," you'll be able to see all the sites that are being hosted by the same company, including Twitter.
In this case, you can see that there are 187 websites and a lot of them are using www.yourcompanynamehere.com as their domain name and www.HostGator as their server company.
This means it's most likely a legitimate website about your business, so it's worth following up with for leads and not something malicious or sketchy going on behind the scenes.
Once you've added your keywords in Social Media Mention, the next step is to set up a campaign. This is where you tell Social Mention which keywords you want them to check for mentions and then how often.
You'll want to add 10-15 keywords that you're interested in getting leads for, for short-term results. For example, this article is about my website's business idea and since it's brand new I'm going to add "Brilliant Concept" as one of my social media mentions keywords.
These are just examples though; I didn't choose them because they're used in Google searches or because they're the easiest or best way to promote my business idea. I did it simply because they're the keywords that I know people will use when they search my site.
You can choose to set up Social Mention to check for mentions of your business anywhere on the web, but if you do, I recommend only looking for mentions near where you want to promote your marketing campaign. Some of you might think it's too much work, especially if your target audience is in a specific geographic location, as in in this article , but it worked out well for me because I have a very small business in a very specific industry that caters to clients and customers who live around me.
So, I went ahead and set up my keywords with SocialMention.com using the example above as my campaign and chose to look for mentions around the web in June or July of 2011 (based on the end date for this article). For short-term results, I chose a daily report time frame so that I can see when people search it one time.
In this case, I had set it up so that it would search just Facebook and Twitter. Social Mention also allows you to check for other platforms like Pinterest, Bing and Yahoo too if you have them installed in your website's CMS from a provider like Google Webmasters . So, if you use them in your website's CMS instead of Facebook or Twitter (e.g. WordPress, Joomla or Drupal), you can use them as well.
Once you set up your keywords, you will be able to add a campaign name and description like this:
Then you'll be given the option to "Setup" or "Post." I chose the first option because I didn't want to setup everything now and have it get messed up later if I had any problems.
Then, you'll be able to enter your promotion campaign. This is the same information that you would put in when creating an ad in Google AdWords . The most important thing here is to choose which type of campaign that you want Social Mention to run for your business's keywords so different people see it at different times.
Once you choose a campaign and you click on "Save," it will take you to the next step where you will be able to see all of your campaigns in one place.
From this screen, you'll also be able to see how many times your keyword has been mentioned on a daily basis:
If things look okay, the next thing I would do would be to start promoting my business idea. I didn't want to do that right away though because I was waiting for Social Mention's report to come in first so that I could use it.
A couple of days later, when my report came in, I started promoting it on Facebook and Twitter by simultaneously sending traffic from both platforms over to my website's landing page .
Conclusion
After promoting it for a week, I started to see results. Over the course of two weeks, my website got about 5,300 views from 7 countries.
I also saw that 3-4 people came up and started talking to me during my lunch break and wanted to know more about the product or service I was selling.
Additionally, one person said they wanted to sell their house and another said they would consider buying one when they needed one in a few years down the road.
These are just examples though; there may have been even more results that I just don't remember because it was very early on in my business idea's marketing lifecycle for lead generation purposes.