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Hey there, internet fans, Ryan Perry here. It is Wednesday, February 10th, therefore, it is Social Media Wednesday. This is the second week, Sarah, with Provaro Marketing and I are testing out Blab to do our weekly episodes of Social Media Wednesday. And it’s been interesting, to say the least. There’s definitely a learning curve. I think Blab is still in beta for a reason. So… But we’re going to see it through. I want to do this for at least a month, maybe two months, see what happens. See if we can build an audience here and all that type of fun stuff. Speaking of building audiences, you want to talk about five different ways to find content for social media?

Sarah Giometti: Find trending topics. So this can also go across the board if you’re doing blog articles or videos, but since we primarily talk about social media, it’s a way for you to find trending topics that your audience finds interesting. And so you can gear your social media content strategy around that.

RP: So we’re just talking about relevant content then, what’s relevant now trending, those type of things?

SG: Right. Yep, yep. So ’cause that’s one of the biggest problems and hurdles for business owners is they don’t know what to post, they don’t know where to find it. They feel like it’s a daunting task to find enough content to post on social media on a regular basis. So this is an opportunity… Or these are tips for them to help make that a less of a daunting task.

RP: And it is daunting, because I do it for my own business. And it’s like every day, “Alright I gotta find new content for Twitter, new content for Facebook, my own video blogs. We gotta do contents for our weekly shows.” So yeah, content is a big thing. We’ve got five tips today, so why don’t we just jump right in with tip number one.

SG: So tip number one is Twitter. Twitter easily tells you what’s trending. But you can also do… You can search by hashtags, you can… There’s a lot. Facebook… Twitter has a really good search function. So you can get a list of current trends, see if any of those are relevant to your business and your audience. You can do searches by hashtags, seeing what people are posting with that hashtag. So it’s a good way to get some basic research done. But not everybody’s on Twitter and you also… It requires for you to log in, to be in there, to actively do it. Google Trends is the other one that we like to use ’cause Google provides so much analytics. They know what people are doing searches for. Through Google Trends you can find some good options for your business. You can do a search, you can also do it by county, by state, so you can narrow down to your geographic market and find out what’s trending, what’s popular, what’s important to the people in your area. That’s especially important for local businesses.

RP: Okay. Now, with Google Trends though, don’t you typically need to put keywords in that you’re actually searching for that you want to find what’s currently trending?

SG: Right. So if you found some stuff on Twitter and you want to dig more into that, you can take that keyword or topic and put it into Google Trends and see if that’s trending in your area. So this is a way for local businesses to go, “Okay well, the global world on Twitter thinks this is kind of an important topic. Now, does my local area think it’s important as well?” And it’ll help you figure out if you can eliminate that, or if it should be added to your content strategy.

RP: Okay. Perfect.

SG: Social Mention is a new tool to me. I don’t know how long they’ve been around, but it has a lot of analysis on a large amount of websites. And so it goes through… You can put queries, you can see about influencers in your area, people who regularly post on social networks on the topic that you’re looking at. And you can get some different data from it and you can… Again though, you have to start with a keyword phrase. You gotta have some information. Plug that in and it gives you across different platforms, primarily Facebook and Twitter, and it gives you data if that’s trending or not. And so, it doesn’t have the geo-local component of it, but you can, at least, see on a couple of different platforms, if something that you thought about is a relevant phrase or topic for you to use.

SG: So I haven’t used that one a ton, but it is something… It’s a free tool online and you can just type in a phrase. And so, more data doesn’t always hurt, and so if you check out with the topic that you’re trying to research on a couple of different places, then it can’t hurt you. You don’t want to go down the rabbit hole too far with data. If something… If you see in a couple of places that it is not a relevant topic, just drop it and move on. But you can see if the influencers in your industry are in it, you can see if it’s on Facebook and Twitter, which platform is more important to your users and see… So if your users are on Facebook more, you’re on Facebook more, and the phrase that you’re searching is more popular on Facebook, then it’s probably a good one for you to consider.

RP: Okay.

SG: The next one I haven’t used at all, I actually just learned about it in doing my research for today’s talk. It’s called “Keyhole” and you can track hashtags across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And if you’re familiar with Google Alerts, it works the same way. So Google Alerts, for those of you who don’t know, is you can plug in a specific phrase and whenever that phrase has an article written or mentioned on the internet, Google will email you the list of links to those articles, blog articles mentioned. So it operates the same way, but it’s on hashtags. And this is really relevant. Twitter operates on hashtags, people do searches on hashtags, Instagram operates the same way. Hashtags aren’t quite as popular and useful in Facebook ’cause people just haven’t adopted it. But this is really useful when you’re putting Instagrams on Facebook and Twitter.

SG: If you’re putting hashtags on Instagram and Twitter, I’m getting them all mixed up at this point. You don’t know if they’re working or not, so this is a really cool tool that I’m definitely going to dig into. Again, it’s called Keyhole and it’s a great way to see how many people are using it, is it a popular hashtag? And there’s another tool that we’re going to talk about that will give you even more data on, is that hashtag working for you? So you can use Keyhole to find hashtags that might be relevant for you, and then another tool that we’re about to get to and see if that actually works for you. And so you’re connecting all these dots on your data to streamline and improve your social media strategy.

RP: Yeah, okay. There’s another one if you’re looking for trending contents, and I’m just going to throw it in as hashtagify.me, I think it’s dot me. Yeah, hashtagify.me. It’s a really cool tool. I know it’s not on our top five list here, but just as we were talking, I thought about it because I ran into it a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really interesting. One of the things I like about it is that, similar to Answer The Public, which will give you content ideas where you put in a keyword in to Answer The Public and then it gives you all the little surrounding topics of conversation that are around that keyword, you can do the same thing with hashtagify.me, and you can put a hashtag in and then it’ll pop up all the relevant hashtags that are popping up around it. But the other cool thing is, it also lets you know who is an influencer around that hashtag. So that’s one of the things we’ve talked about in the past, is that you want to gain visibility, you want to be in the space of other influencers.

RP: #cat.

SG: This is silly, cat, move!

SG: We got to start coming into the office for these.

RP: There you go. Well, I’m in the office.

SG: I know, I know. That’s why I do it here so we don’t talk over each other.

RP: But it’s really cool because you can go in the hashtagify, just pop it in, but it will give you additional content ideas, and from there, you can run that through the five tips that we’re talking about here. And like you said earlier, you don’t want to get too deep into data sometimes, otherwise you can spend all day in data.

SG: Right, right. Sorry, I’m reading the comments on here.

RP: Yeah. From CM79. He’s the one here, thank you very much, we appreciate it.

SG: Yeah. That would be terrible if I was talking to myself.

RP: Not that you ever do.

SG: No, no, never, never. So but anyway, the data, you definitely want to pay attention to data. We talked about that. If you were following us over on the Hangouts and transferred with us over here, data is your friend in social media. You don’t need to get too… For those of you who hate numbers, you don’t have to get too buried in the data, but you do need to follow some data, so that you can… So you know if it’s working or not. Because if you’re not checking your numbers, then you’re just wasting your time.

RP: Right.

SG: And so I think that was four. So the fifth tool, and this is one was actually surprising me. I’ve been trying to find, and I have unsuccessfully found it, and it could just be it’s there and I haven’t found it. There are no really good free Instagram analytic tools. It’s… They’re buried under, like Iconosquared is a paid account, and Instagram, I know it’s there because Facebook owns them, but it’s not rolled out to the general public, so the normal small business owners do not have access to the analytics. And so in my research, I discovered that Sprout Social, who I haven’t looked at in a while, they have Instagram analytics built in to their account. And so you can see what hashtags people are interacting with you, how they got to your through which hashtag search. And so ’cause Instagram, one of the things… They recommend 12, around 12 to 15 hashtags per post, and so you never really know which one is quite working for you if you’re putting a whole bunch of hashtags in there.

SG: Sprout Social is something I think I’m going to dig into it a bit more, where you can see which hashtags garnered the likes and interaction on your post, and so you can streamline and update the ones that you’re using. And so that was a really interesting tool that I thought would be useful in this kind of data and trending topics is to see, “Okay, you’ve done all this research to start using hashtags and topics, now here’s the end result data especially, specifically for Instagram.” ‘Cause Twitter has analytics built-in as long as you turned it on, Facebook has analytics for your page, and so this is a way to see on Instagram if all of that research you did, if it’s actually working for you. So again, you can tweak it and continually tweak it so it’s more efficient.

RP: Yeah. You know I just did a post. I’ll have to find how, I hope to see if I can find it here, ’cause I know we’re running out of time. On my #OneMinuteMarketingtips on YouTube, and it was there is a website that’s the same thing, it’s paid, but you put in… It’ll actually, you link it to your Twitter account, it’ll actually pull in your Twitter feed and it’ll analyze your individual tweets looking for hashtags. And if you are hash tagging, it’ll let you know how popular that hashtag is, or has like three different colours, if it’s overused, if it’s trending, if it’s irrelevant. But it would also give you some other suggestions on how you can improve your tweet itself. It’s like doing an SEO analyzing your website, but it’s actually doing it for your Twitter feed and it’s really cool. And I cannot think of what it is off the dig through and off the post when I post this to YouTube, I have to push that link in there because it’s really a cool tool. Unfortunately, it is a paid one though.

SG: Yeah. And that’s kind of the problem like they are better… There is the issue we are going to come across is the better analytics that digs into things more, they are unfortunately almost always going to paid options. So for small business owners, we know you’re a limited budget, you have to see what’s the most important, and what you need to pay for. Sprout Social also allows you to post, but it’s $60 a month per user for up to 10 profiles, whereas you have, HootSuite is $10 if you need some auto posting help. And so, you really need to look at, use what you can for free, and then if you absolutely need to pay for something, then you can. You could also do a… Almost all of them are free trials. So if you just wanted to get a short glimpse, you got seven, 14, 30-day trials, it differs on every software, but do a free trial to just see… So you can get that data for a short period of time and then not pay for it at this moment. And then go back to them when you got a budget to pay for and have more analytics. Well, these give you a snapshot of what’s going on.

RP: Alright. Okay, perfect. Tell you what, our time is up for today’s show but let’s go over to those five tips, five different places that you can check out to kind of find additional content that’s trending for your social media, after you’ve done typing, of course.

SG: This is weird, I can’t multi task like this very well.

RP: Girl, you’re supposed to be able to multi task that’s the whole part.

SG: I know. I don’t remember either. Multitasking is actually not a really good skill. People who say they’re good at it is actually bad.

RP: They’re lying. Alright. And so five tips. Go ahead, talk and type. Talk and type.

SG: Okay. Top five was Twitter, Google Trends, Social Mention, Keyhole and Sprout Social.

RP: And Keyhole, are each one of those websites is actually keyhole.com?

SG: Let’s see… Yeah, keyhole.co, so keyhole.co. Social Mention is socialmention.com, and just Google, Google Trends. You should know what Twitter is, and Sprout Social is sproutsocial.com.

RP: Oh yeah, and then the other one that I brought up was going to be Answer The Public, which is answerthepublic.com, really cool keyword tool. And then, the other one was hashtagify.me. It’s kind of like Answer The Public, but it’s specifically for hashtags. So you can find trending hashtags, and you can also find out who is really talking about that hashtag, so who’s the thought leader, essentially because they’re using that hashtag a lot. And then CMF79 also mentioned a wiki, mindmap.org which I haven’t looked at yet, but I will after the show. So we are close to 10 different websites to check out that will help give you that information that you need. ‘Cause what we’ve talked about when we originally started the show is that it’s really hard to find content or to come up with content ideas, and if you know what it is that you want to talk about, going out and doing some research with these other tools are going to be great, ’cause they’re going to give you other ideas, other keywords that are relevant to your primary keyword that you can talk about. So any closing statements there, Sarah?

SG: No, I would just say don’t feel overwhelmed, just take it one step at a time. That’s always our theme through this is pick one thing and do that. You don’t need to look at all 10, just do what you can manage and bring it down to byte-sized chunks and you’ll be able to handle it.

RP: Right. Alright. Perfect. Yeah, it’s all about layers, all about layers, just add a little bit of layer each time. That’s it for today’s show. We are going to be back here, same computer, same screen, 9:45 next Wednesday for another Social Media Wednesday Blab. This is new for us, so those of you that are following CMF79, thank you very much for your input. We hope to see you here again next week. Take care.