2 Must Have Inbound Marketing Tools
Posted by Jason Rudland on Fri, Jan 20, 2012 @ 01:15 AM
One of the key concepts of Inbound marketing is to join "the" conversation. That is, the conversation happening right now about you, your products or services, your brand or your industry. It is a sure-fire way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. But how can you be everywhere at once? How can you filter out the noise of the Internet? It can feel like you are whispering in a nightclub, so here are two must have tools that will help you engage with the social media-sphere.
Google Reader
It took me a while to warm up to Google Reader, but now I would not be without it. Google Reader will help you track blogs, news and even questions being asked in your area of expertise.
Monitoring Your Favourite Blogs
Blogs are a fairly obvious use of Google Reader - you simply click on the orange RSS feed icon on your favourite blogs to add them to your feed.
Monitoring Your Industry News
Getting a news feed in Google Reader is less obvious. To stay up-to-date on industry news simply go to Google blogsearch and do a search on your chosen term. For example, if I wanted to track all "Inbound Marketing" news I would do a search for "Inbound marketing." At the bottom of the results page is a link which will add that Google alert to your feed - including all new blogs and news.
Monitoring Your Industry Questions
The next thing to add to your feed makes Google Reader the must have tool it is. Log in to your LinkedIn account and browser to LinkedIN Answers. LinkedIn suggests categories of questions which it thinks you are well placed to answer. In the right-hand column is an option to subscribe to the RSS feed!
You now have industry relevant questions directly in your Google Reader feed.
TweetDeck
Once you have blogs, news & questions in your feed the remaining part of the puzzle is social media. There are thousands of apps on the Internet to help you monitor social media, and ultimately you must choose the one which suits you best. However, I will recommend TweetDeck. especially if, like me, you are a devout Mac user.
Despite its name TweetDeck connects to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It will then post a feed of your connections' social updates in columns. The clever part is when you configure it to alert you when you are mentioned or tweeted directly. These are the tweets you must reply to, if only to thank the tweeter.
Between Google Reader & TweetDeck you can effectively filter out the noise of the Internet and get a relevant and manageable feed of information which you can chose to dip in and out of throughout the day.
What is your favourite monitoring application?
