There are great tools available to help search marketers expand upon their existing campaigns and come up with actionable insights to make their campaigns more efficient. Tools like Microsoft Advertising Intelligence & Microsoft adCenter Labs do a fantastic job at precisely this. You can do new keyword research, pull demographic information, & find keyword price estimates all at the click of a button. Search engine marketers find tools like these to be very helpful, but what else can be done to optimize campaigns?

Social media offers a great resource to help generate ideas on how search marketers can expand their current campaigns and optimize ad copy to best address searchers’ needs. Twitter, Facebook, online forums, blogs, & other social media outlets are where consumers are engaging in conversations about your products, brand, & industry. Listening in on the conversations happening on these properties can translate into insightful, precise optimizations for your search campaigns. Below are three ways to use social media to optimize search and I invite you to list more ways in the comment section.

For more information on social media check out Microsoft Advertising’s social media white paper Learn and Earn.

Keyword and Negative Keyword Expansions

Bing Twitter searches & Twitter searches reveal the topics people are tweeting about regarding your search terms. Bing Twitter search works better for this research since Bing aggregates tweets by top shared links which makes for easy scanning of popular topics.

A good place to start your search would be with your brand or top selling product. For this blog post, let’s say we are an online retailer who sells sport jerseys. A quick Bing Twitter search shows that there was a lot of buzz around Bing sponsoring the Seattle Storm’s jersey. We can use this information in two ways to help optimize our account.

The first way we can use this information is to expand our current keyword set. People may begin searching on ‘Bing jersey’, ‘Seattle jersey Bing’, etc. in looking to purchase the new Seattle Storm jersey. This is an opportunity for this retailer to see sales from a new set of search terms.

The second way we can use this information would be to prevent our ads from serving on these terms with negative keywords. Suppose this retailer who sold jerseys did not sell W.N.B.A. jerseys, we would want to mitigate the search traffic looking for the new Seattle Storm jerseys. We would want to use ‘Bing’, ‘Microsoft’, etc. as new negatives for our sports jersey campaigns.

Ad Copy Optimization

Engaging with consumers through ad copy is a part of search engine marketing (SEM) that can keep us constantly on the edge of our seats trying to figure out what words and phrases resonate best with searchers. One practice a marketer can use is to scan the social media conversations happening across the web to ensure that their ad copy is speaking the needs of their audience. Again, a Bing Twitter search will help you scan the conversations that are related to your business. Look for recurring themes and issues people are experiencing with your product. Tailoring your ad copy to address the needs people are tweeting about can help you connect better with consumers when they are searching on Bing.

There are many ways marketers can use social media to listen in on the online conversations occurring about their products. The ones listed above are ideas to get you started and I look forward to hearing from others on how they have used social media to help better engage with consumers through search and other marketing mediums.

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