One important aspect of social media optimization is finding individuals interested in your products or initiatives. One way to approach this is to find key influencers within a social network that might be interested in your offering.
This can be a difficult challenge at times therefore targeting and approaching the right people is key. With the help of Google one can alleviate some of the challenges that occur when searching for these people inside each network, as each network can be finicky when it comes to searching for users.
With the right search query used in Google, it is fairly easy to find these individuals. Here is one example: “site:facebook.com/people led zeppelin”
In this query, we took Facebook.com, which indexes profiles pages with personal interests (so long as that user has not turned off that feature in privacy settings) Now that you are able to find users on Facebook who have stated interest in Led Zeppelin you can approach them with much more certainty that they would be interested in your offering or service.
Once you have identified a group of users to outreach to you need to fine tune your pitch. I find success when the pitch typically is short, sweet, and to the point. Remember users on social networks are there to “hang out” per se and don’t want to be lambasted by pushy marketers, so make sure your offering is irresistible.
In the above example, we found users who are fans of Led Zeppelin, on Facebook, however this can be done on many other Social Networks. Below are example searches to use on 8 different social networks:
site:linkedin.com inurl:in “social media expert”
Bebo
site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo “social media expert”
CafeMom
site:www.cafemom.com inurl:cafemom.com/home/ “stay at home mom”
site:facebook.com/people “led zeppelin”
Flickr
site:flickr.com/people “@gmail”
site:twitter.com -inurl:statuses -inurl:status “social media expert”
MySpace
site:profile.myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction “go to nc state”
YouTube
site:youtube.com/user “social media expert”
Since it can be somewhat cumbersome to recreate these search queries on a whim I have designed a social search tool to help users. It’s a very basic Google gadget that has hard coded search queries into it, thus allowing you to simply query the respective social network.
I found your blog post while searching Google. Very relevant especially as this is not an issue which a lot of peaople know that well
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by FutureRanking: How to Target Users Within Social Networks http://goo.gl/fb/2UcF…
i always like reading articles here. thanks for providing useful information
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lou Sagar, Daniel Perez Colomar, FutureRanking, FutureRanking, FutureRanking and others. FutureRanking said: How to Target Users Within Social Networks http://goo.gl/fb/2UcF [...]
Please, can you mail me and tell me a bit about this, I’m a close friend of your site:)
There’s no denying the power and popularity of the Black Google search engine, and in comparison to other similar search engines such as Bing, where results are based on page rankings and algorithms, they excel. Thank you FutureRanking.com for this helpful incite.
As a newcomer to the Internet, I’m always looking online for details which will assist me. This is the best one I’ve found so far, thank you!
Thank you for your analysis and sharing, from your article I learned more.