Business marketing on social networks and blogs can be difficult. If you’re a business or product owner I’m sure you’ve experienced the pain of trying to figure out who you should be marketing to and how. Online marketing is certainly one of the best ways of doing it, and social media has become an important tool in getting the word out about your business. What isn’t always clear is how to know who to market to on social media networks—who is interested in your business or product, and how do you find them?
Bottlenose is the answer. It’s a way to find and share specific content from social networks and groups, and it could transform the way product and business owners market online.
So What is Bottlenose and How Does it Work?
Here’s the quick and dirty on what it does—enter a keyword or phrase, and Bottlenose will display in real time tweets and posts related to that topic and place them in order of importance. You can search just your followers, or everyone in the social media universe, and find out just what people are saying about the topic. You can then join in on the conversation, or share the information with others. It’s a way to identify thousands of potential clients that you would never have been able to identify on your own.
In the example below, I searched for “SEO Guides” and got the following results.
You can also get the same information in newspaper format to get a more comprehensive description of what’s being said.
What makes this so revolutionary is that you can then join in on any conversation and either directly or discreetly promote your business. Respond to a comment by mentioning your product, or respond as your business and don’t reference your product at all. Either way, you are exposing your business to thousands of new eyes.
Additional Features that Make Bottlenose a Great Marketing Tool
Buffer Integration
Beyond the search function, Bottlenose has a number of features that will change the way you market and share information online. The first is that you can add your Buffer to your Bottlenose account and quickly and easily fill up your Buffer with trending, relevant information. The easiest way to do this is to use the “Top Links Now” tab. This feature takes your Twitter stream and orders it by most popular.
You can then easily add the best tweets to your Buffer at the touch of a button. And if you want to add original posts, you can enter a message of any length and Bottlenose will intelligently shorten them to meet Twitter limitations and then provide a link to the full message.
Sonar
The Sonar feature is the one that can really expand the reach of your social media marketing. It gives you a visual representation of live trending topics, whose talking about them, how they’re doing it, and how they relate. It expands a basic topic like “SEO Guide” and shows you how it connects to topics like “e-commerce,” “link building,” and “WordPress,” thereby expanding your advertising targets. You can also use it to get the basics of a fast moving conversation, so you don’t have to scroll through and read tons of messages to understand the flow of the conversation.
Rules
The Rules feature lets you set rules for who you want to follow and how. Only interested in knowing when specific followers are talking about your product? Set a rule. Want to filter your search results to avoid showing complaints or rumors? There’s a rule for that. Only interested in viewing certain types of messages, like news or statuses? There’s a rule for that too. Bottlenose allows for endless optimization when it comes to how and what shows up in your stream so that you save time when searching for topics and people.
Analyze Usernames
One of the most powerful features of Bottlenose is that it will analyze Twitter usernames in real time. By clicking on a name, you will see what the user’s interests are, their favorite topics, people they mention, and their expertise. This is a great way to focus your marketing efforts on specific types of customers and expand your efforts to people they know who share the same interests.
Convinced yet?
If you haven’t figured it out yet, Bottlenose can really transform the way that you share information about your business or product online. What I like about it is that your advertising doesn’t have to be bold and in your face—simply respond to a relevant post using your business or product’s username, and you may stir up interest in your product from people who have never heard of it.
You can also engage users in a discussion about your business topic, and then casually slip in your product’s name. Or simply share what other people are saying about your product through your Buffer. There are a number of ways that blog commenting campaigns can be done, and Bottlenose takes the work out of finding relevant groups to market to.
Give it a try—it’s completely free. And if you don’t find that it works for your business, I’m sure you’ll still find that it’s a lot of fun!
