 |
 |
 |
|
01.19.09 Increase Your Site Traffic With Social Search Engines  By Lee Odden There are many reasons to search social media including monitoring for brand and reputation management purposes. Smart online marketers have also been using social search for other reasons including competitive research and opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends. Most advice on how companies should be listening to the social web with minimal cost involves monitoring individual services, which is inefficient. Premium social media monitoring services do this much more effectively but can be expensive. Here are 6 free social search tools that may help small businesses make their initial foray into searching the social web more productive while keeping costs to a minimum.  Delver is a "socially connected" search tool in alpha, that is based on your friends influence on content, i.e. drawing upon the "wisdom of crowds" to filter the universe of search content. You first identify your social profiles and can then add more specific information to then identify your own social graph. Facebook is emphasized. Search results are then influenced by your network. If Google ever buys Facebook then this service might be an attractive target.
 WhosTalkin? not to be confused with "Who U Stalkin", is a social media search tool by Joe Hall that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest. Queries are performed against all sources but you can search on specific social services organized by: Blogs, News, Networks, Videos, Images, Forums and Tags. The list of practicing SEOs that beta tested this tool includes some genuine smarties so this one may be worth watching since saved searches, RSS feeds and other features found in the tools below are not yet rolled out. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Lee Odden is CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and public relations firm in Minnesota that specializes in search, social and online PR consulting and training for companies worldwide. Odden has been cited for his internet marketing expertise over the past 10 years by the Economist, Forbes and U.S. News and contributed a chapter to the book, "Online Marketing Heroes" published by Wiley. For the past 5 years he has also been the editor of TopRank's Online Marketing Blog, a Technorati 100 favorite blog and one of the top marketing blogs according to Advertising Age. |
|
| ||||||||||||||||
-- SmallSiteNews is an iEntry, Inc. publication -- iEntry, Inc. 2549 Richmond Road, Lexington, KY 40509 2009 iEntry, Inc. All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy | Legal archives | advertising info | news headlines | free newsletters | comments/feedback | submit article |
