Whether you’re a business looking to interact with customers or potential customers or someone who just likes to stay informed, tracking what’s being said online can be overwhelming. At the same time, it’s childs play. I’ll show you how i track leaving cert stuff. Dummy style….
We’ll use three things. Three websites. Google, Facebook & Twitter. Let’s go…
Google.com/news
A lot of ideas for my posts on theleavingcert.com come from leaving cert news. It’s important i keep up to date with what’s happening. I can’t run a leaving cert website if i’m not staying up to date with latest controversies and changes to courses, rules etc… Just like a teacher teaching an old course, that wouldn’t be of any use. I use google news to see what the papers are talking about.
I go to google.com/news and type in ‘leaving cert’. Job done.
Facebook.com
To search facebook, you need a facebook profile. Setting one up isn’t exactly rocket science or time consuming. Set up a fake one if you want, it doesn’t matter. Once you’re logged in, you then have the ability to search.
Again, type in ‘leaving cert’ and click on ‘Posts by everyone’ in the left hand column. This will give you public search results for anyone that mentions ‘leaving cert’. Check out their profiles, send them messages, add them as friends or just watch what they’re saying… it’s up to you.
Obviously if someone is saying “help me, where can i find a leaving cert website?”, you’re going to act (well, I’M going to act). If someone else says “i’m glad i’ve done my leaving cert 20 years ago”, you’re not going to act, because to put it bluntly, that person is of no use to you. Facebook and social media in general is all about using people, not matter what anyone says. Just like real life, you’ll have a few genuine connections, the rest will be used as stepping stones or to scratch backs. That’s real life and it’s the same online.
Twitter.com
Just like google and facebook, if we wanna search twitter for all things leaving cert, we type in ‘leaving cert’ in to the search box. Easy.
Again if you want to interact with people, you’ll need a profile which takes 10 seconds to set up. A little longer to customize and get it looking semi-respectable.
It’s that easy
It really is that easy. If you’re the type of person that doesn’t want hassle, don’t bother with tools and applications which try to condense everything or make things easier, put them all under roof roof – you’re just gonna complicate things. Now there are more advanced, sophisticated, automated ways of doing all this but this is a guide for dummies, so we’ll save those tools for another day. I just wanted to keep it ultra simple for today.
Let’s say you own a wallet shop (first thing that popped in to my head). Search facebook for ‘torn wallet’, ‘ripped wallet’, ‘lost wallet’. See what people are saying and add them as friends or message them offering them an exclusive 10% off. Make the message personal. It works.
If i tweet about my car breaking down i’m not thinking about anything else other than my car breaking down. But if some smart garage were to see my tweet and offer me exclusive deals or some kind of offer and make it personal, i’d welcome it. It’s not spam, it’s not mass marketing…. it’s not a flyer through the door or stuck on my window. It’s targetted. It’s personalized. That makes the offer stand out, even if the offer itself is rubbish.