One of the key strategies marketers use to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns is to build profitable relationships with influencers and fans. These influencers and fans play key roles in generating word-of-mouth buzz about a brand. And one of the greatest benefits of social media is to enable marketers to identify, reach out to, and engage them at a deeper level.
Today, I’ll share 3 (+ 1 bonus) ways that I’ve used to identify these people that are important for my clients.
Method 1: Using Google
It is simple to see who shares your content if you have Google installed on your website.
Login to Google , click on your website, “Reporting” tab, and you should see the left menu like the photo above. Look for “Acquisition”, then click on “Social” > “Trackbacks”. A list of websites that shared your content will be shown.
Endorsing URL refers to the list of websites that shared your content and it also provides you with the exact URL of the page where your content is featured. “Your Page” refers to the content that is shared. On the right (not featured in the photo above), you can even see how many clicks/views resulted from the share. Great for you to decide the importance of the one who shared your content!
Method 2: Search for your domain on Twitter
To do so, simply type your domain into Twitter’s search function to see who shared your content on Twitter. Note that this applies only to accounts visible to public.
To make it easy for you to watch when your content is shared, download Tweetdeck, which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Tweetdeck allows you to save a custom stream. Very useful if you have time constraints and you need to look through things quickly everyday.
If you need an automated option, try Twitter monitoring tools such as Commun.it. You may sign up for a free account and use it for a lifetime, but it can get really expensive if you have a large Twitter following.
Method 3: Search for mentions of your brand using Socialmention
If you need another free tool, Socialmention can come in handy. It scours all the social media platforms online for mentions that match your search query. Like Twitter, the search results are also limited only to public mentions, and Facebook mentions remain out of reach with this tool. Another similar tool is 48ers.
I haven’t found a tool that actually tracks the links that are shared. Facebook native Graph Search might allow this ability in time to come, but till then, you may try the bonus method below.
Bonus Tip: Trial and error
This method is largely developed based on my experience fiddling around with things. Using this method, I managed to find multiple Facebook Pages which shared my blog posts, and from there I managed to identify several people who shared the posts and got lots of engagement. Again, this is limited only to posts that are public.
I noticed on Google real-time that most of my visitors came from Netherlands within a short period of 30 minutes. I proceeded to track my URL, http://jasonhjh.com, on Twitter. The search returned a NL twitter handle and I did a search on Facebook for the same account name. The Facebook Page turned up and I was able to reach out to them and thank them for sharing my article.
Moral of the story? Cross-check your leads on any platform before you give up. The extra time taken to undertake these tasks may connect your business to some crucial influencers and fans who may turn out to be the bridge to your gold mine.
And that’s it! I’ll follow-up on the topic of social media influencers and engaged fans. If you want to know more about specific strategies and tactics that you may use to gather and empower this group of people to create higher reach and conversion rates, do subscribe for my blog updates here.
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