Social media marketing is about listening and joining conversation to engage and build relationship with people to generate sales. There is one important question we need to ask ourselves after we have set our social media marketing goals is "WHERE ARE THEY?"

Internet is huge. It has a lot of social networking sites, e.g Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and the latest Pinterest. But due to limited resources of one company, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises, we can't appear on every single social networking site. So the question is where is your target market? Is your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Google Plus your target social networking sites? Or Youtube? Or Forum? Or even none of them? You need to get them on the right social networking site.

Imagine this situation – your build your Facebook Fan Page, you spend 2 hours to generate content per day and post on Facebook but... your company sales never go up! Finally you realize that Facebook is a not suitable platform for you. You waste your time and money.

From my personal experience, I have a customer who has customers are mostly lawyers and doctors. They don't even have Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts. We have to use Youtube (video marketing) and email to engage them.

Below are some tools that you can use to search your markets:

1) Social Mention
Social mention is a real time social search. It is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the web into a single stream of information. It monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. All you have to do is put in your keywords and social mention will search the whole internet for you whoever mentions the keywords that you put in. You can even select social media sources for your keywords. It is a very powerful tool to search your target market online.

We tried to search by using keyword Legoland Malaysia and below is the result. As you can see, Twitter is the best sources for you to get in and engage with people who interested in Legoland Malaysia.

2) Hootsuite Search (Twitter + Facebook)
Hootsuite is a Social Media Dashboard for you to manage your social media account, e.g Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. You can use Hootsuite to create streams for the keywords that you would like to search. Below is the sample of a stream for keyword Legoland Malaysia and Lego Malaysia.

3) Whos Talkin
WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. They search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet's most popular social media gateways. They take this data and display it to you through our carefully designed interface that harnesses the power of AJAX to give you a seamlessly well-organized user experience.

4) Google Search, Blog,  Plus Search
Google Plus search is another very powerful tool to search if your target market is on Google Plus. We have tried to search on Google Plus by using keyword – Legoland Malaysia and there are some people mentions on Legoland Malaysia. But compared to Twitter, Google+ has less people. Not only Google Plus Search, you can use Google Search, Google Blog Search to check your target market as well. Please visit Social Search Guide: 40+ Social Search Engines.

Hope this blog post helps you in searching your target market.

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