Tracking Trends on Social Media Sites

Building a super successful ecommerce business really is something you can do from your Lazy Boy recliner! That doesn’t mean you should, of course, it just means that there are numerous tools in place to help you stay at the top of your game at all times. And at all times, the game is about keywords and relevance.

 

When running ad campaigns and attempting to drive more traffic to your site, keywords are of the utmost importance. Go too vague, and you loose consumers who are looking for something specific. Research is absolutely necessary before you begin any adword campaign, and also periodically throughout your marketing efforts. The following tools will help you gain valuable knowledge regarding keywords.

 

When searching the latest and greatest social media sites for buzz on keywords related to your business niche, it is important that you look at the words used in conjunction with your keywords, for oftentimes users are simply mentioning something and a particular keyword happens to be included. The goal is to find out if there is a buzz related to what you have to offer, and what that buzz is.

 

Lexicon is one tool that will help you get your hand on the pulse of the general public. This application is used with the popular social media site, Facebook. To utilize Lexicon on Facebook, you need to first have a Facebook account, for this application is used in conjunction with the site. Lexicon searches wall posts to obtain a general conversation held throughout the site; pretty fascinating, if you ask me.

 

Once logged on to Facebook, simply search “lexicon” (quotations not necessary) and the application will become available. You can use this application to search for specific keywords related to your business. For example, if you sell pizza, you will see that in December, relatively few people post about pizza. Perhaps this indicates that many are still recovering from their Thanksgiving day festivities. Try out Lexicon for your niche and see what sort of buzz you tune into.

 

And then there is Twitter, the new craze that has wings flapping and fingers strumming keyboards all across the globe. For searching Tweets, there is Twist. Twist was actually launched in 2008, but not everyone has caught on to the benefits of Twitter tools for business just yet. What Twist does is similar to Lexicon, but for the Twitter site only. Twist finds all mentions of your specified terms in messages and graphs them over time. Using Twist, you can even click on any specific term and go directly to recent Tweets for that phrase.

 

Using Twist, you can compare terms against one another. For instance, let’s take the pizza business again. Comparing pizza to burgers, you will find that pizza wins out every time as far as mentions go. From this data, you could draw the conclusion that the pizza business would fair better than a burger joint.

 

Now, you are most likely not selling pizza or burgers, I know; but examples are what they are. The main point of these applications is to help you see what the general public’s awareness is on any given topic. When your focus is to build your business, it is the voice of the general public that matters the most; and therefore utilizing social media sites and their tools will do the best job of telling you what you need to know.

Using Google Keywords Tool

When making decisions about marketing campaigns, PPC campaigns and general business strategies, it is wise to utilize any and all tools available to you. The more the merrier definitely applies here. One of the best tools around is Google keyword tool. Using this free application, you can learn much about the direction your business can and should go for maximum growth.

Here are the steps to using Google’s keyword tool for research:

• Choose the country or countries in which you make marketing efforts. You can also choose languages in this field as well. For those businesses that target more than one country or language, multiple options can be chosen by performing a “Control + Click”.

• Enter Keywords in one of two ways: by choosing your own keywords, or by entering a specific URL from which to pull words. By using a URL, Google will pull keywords off of the site you input and generate a list of related keywords. When choosing your own keywords, you can import words from your Adwords campaign or use a list from a team brainstorming meeting.

Once your words are entered into the search field, click to use synonyms or not to use them. Sometimes using synonyms can return irrelevant keywords, but it is recommended to try it when looking for new keywords. Click “Get Keyword Ideas”.

Using a URL to obtain keywords can result in new words you may not have thought of previously. Here’s how: perform a Google search for your general niche. For example, if you sell patio chairs, perform a search for “patio chairs” and use the top ranking search result as the URL for your keyword search. Using your competitors URLs for keyword research is a very wise move.

• To get the most relevant results for your keyword search, use Exact Match keywords. Once your keywords are displayed, look through columns and remove any columns that do not contain relevant information. This will simplify your search process. Also, sort your results based on relevance to save time.

• Once you have simplified your keyword list online, you can download the list into spreadsheet form so you can work with it offline. This is where you can remove keywords that are not completely relevant to your site.

If your site sells a variety of products, performing a search based on specific lines within your inventory will return the best keywords for you to use in marketing your business.