There is lots of talk in marketing and PR circles about how important social media engagement is. The experts are telling us to get involved with our customers. Interact with customers. Engage customers for ideas and feedback. Participate with them as they experience your products and services.

That sounds good, but you are probably asking: How do I find them? Then how do I connect with them? And finally how do I speak their language?

All simple, logical, and often ignored questions. Interestingly enough they all have the same answer–social media monitoring. Do you have a plan to find and monitor your target?

Find Your Community

It is hard to have a conversation anywhere, online or offline, without having someone to talk to. Social media and social networks are full of people. But, randomly talking to people isn’t very interesting or rewarding. You need to find people like yourself or interested in your expertise.

Finding your community starts with monitoring various social networks (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) and finding out where your people hang-out.

Start Monitoring Social Networks

Tapping into and monitoring these networks can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Here are a few of the most popular:

1. Join the social network. Most social media website require you to join to listen in. And social media works best if you are participating, not just lurking, anyway.

2. Find a way to aggregate your social networks. Google (RSS) Reader, Browser bookmarks, Delicious, and FriendFeed are some of the popular ways I use to aggregate some of my favorite social websites and conversations. The king of social Web aggregation though is RSS. You should learn more if you want to really monitor social media well.

3. Use a professional social media monitoring tool. This is the most efficient way to pull in all the available social media venues and layers in good noise filtering and keyword monitoring.

Listening Makes Engaging Simple

Really the end-game in all of this monitoring is to make your engagement more effective. Regardless of whether you are selling something, learning something, or buying something listening first will make your engagement more effective.

Ultimately, your time online and in social media has some goal or objective. If you begin your strategy with a good monitoring plan you are going to be better prepared–smarter about your audience and the opportunity. Getting you to your objective faster and more efficiently.