FriendFeed is a powerful aggregator of social media. What really makes it interesting is that it is an aggregator of others aggregations. That means you potentially get the best of everyone else’s social media monitoring.
What does that mean? Simply put the best of social media monitoring–aggregation and pretty good noise filtration.
Here are some of my favorite ways to use FriendFeed to monitor social media:
1. Start with some keyword searches - This is the first step to discovering all of the valuable information being exchanged within the social media ecosystem. A few simple searches using keywords important to your business will probably delight you.
This little exercise is likely to expose competitors, consumer, experts, and other relevant people discussing your company, industry, and maybe even your products and services.
2. Analyze these searches for trends and people - Try different combinations and keywords that are relevant to your business. Fairly quickly you will begin to see trends, other keywords, and people that consistently show up in your search streams. These will become the key concepts for your ongoing social media monitoring with FriendFeed.
3. Save the best of your searches - Once you have tuned into some of the best searches it is time to start saving your best ones for ongoing monitoring. FriendFeed makes it simple to save any search that you think will have future value. Then you simply have to click on them during your next monitoring session.
4. Subscribe to the most relevant people - Embedded in those keyword searches are going to be several people that start to stand out as experts or natural curators of information important to your social media monitoring objectives. In FriendFeed people act like filters, the more relevant those that you follow, the more relevant your social media monitoring will be.
5. Start to collect people into descriptive lists - FriendFeed was one of the first social networks to use the concept of Lists. This is a convenient way to categorize the people you follow into various monitoring topics or concepts. This is possibly the best way to tune into the most important chatter about your social media monitoring objective.
6. Grow you monitoring with network analysis - As you monitor saved searches, influential persons, and keywords you will see other opportunities to continue expanding and refining your monitoring. This could mean subscribing to new friends’ feeds, refining your saved searches, or exploring other keywords. This refinement process is a critical part of making your your monitoring more valuable and efficient.
FriendFeed is more than a simple social media aggregator. With a little curiosity and ingenuity is can be a sophisticated competitive intelligence, social media monitoring, or marketing analysis tool. Open a FriendFeed account and see what you can find that might help give you business a little competitive advantage.
Did you enjoy this post?
Join my weekly newsletter for exclusive content or connect with me directly: On Twitter (@billrice) or on Linkedin.
Want more information about Kaleidico's lead management software or services visit www.kaleidico.com.
Comments on this entry are closed.