While classic keyword research counts phrase permutations users search for, Buzz Pocket Mining measures the individual and community-wide social graph. The good news is, incredibly powerful BPM tools are totally free!
“Social graph” simply means categorizing definable pockets of members’ participatory chatter as folks interact, share content, make friends and live lives together. Often expressed by a tag cloud, Buzz Pockets are how we index topical interests, as expressed by users.
The deliverables for BPM research include content & category ideas, keyword baskets and insight regarding influential users. Find content by tag and scrape it for keyword clusters using Google’s External AdWords Keyword Tool, to build potent keyword lists rooted in actual search frequency. It’s money in the bank.
PPC & SEO Keyword Research
We use insight gained from Buzz Pocket Mining to advise traditional keyword research processes by discovering uber-thesaurus stemming ideas, targeted to the collective’s most passionate interests as expressed by behavior. Confused yet? 🙂 Here’s a great StumbleUpon Buzz Pocket Mining tutorial to make things clearer.
BPM datasets are priceless because, as a starting point, listening to what folks actually care about in specific networking and bookmark channels inspires content that’s easy to promote. All the while BMP research provides an insider-peek of each community’s authority figures. They’re likely to enjoy (and propagate) content we already know they’ll like. It’s a win/win deal.
Use Paid Advertising Tools for Free!
Just as with traditional keyword research, killer BPM tools can often be found at the demographic targeting front end of paid advertising platforms. Ever since Overture’s now-retired keyword tool, we’ve been using search engines PPC advertising interfaces to research SEO (non-paid). Facebook and StumbleUpon are terrific examples of using front end paid platform tools to gain insight for organic social media optimization.
20 Totally Free Buzz Pocket Mining Tools
StumbleUpon Recently & All Time Most Popular Hot Tags
This is one of my all time favorite drool-tools. Though SU’s traffic driving propensity is seemingly being siphoned off by rampant migratory Twitterers and Facebook users, the 7 million person sampling still provides very useful insight. Create content advised by this tool and check out how easy it is to market all over the Internet.
Also drill down into any tag and take note of authority users, with influence enough to push content hot, should they take an interest. Come back to them later to share the content you know they’ll like.
Facebook Lexicon
Lexicon is a Facebook tool following language trends all over Facebook. Looking at word and phrase usages on profile, group and event walls, compare the popularity of several words on Facebook walls.
The example compares relative wall buzz for Obama, Sex, Football and the Beatles.
Twitter Search Engines
Twitter has touched off a micro blogging revolution and is rapidly heading mainstream. Mine real time buzz about topics, brands and people in this flammable crucible of human participation. It’s a marketers paradise for insight and influences. This is true and street-level word of mouth marketing. Because the Twitter API is so accessible, many third party tools have cropped up free of cost. (follow us @AIMCLEAR).
- search.twitter.com: Now with people search.
- Searching for Interesting Topics on Twitter: Seek out interesting users and comments. This is a cool tool to locate like minded Twits.
Twellow.com: A People Directory:Yellow pages approach to categorizing Tweople. Create an account to maintain your own record.- Twitturls: Links, pictures and videos hot on Twitter.
- Tweetag: Watch trends in nested tag clouds.
Technorati Blog Search
One of the original BPM tools, use Technorati to find content related to any topic or URL. Though Technorati has gone though several generations of unfocused evolution, it’s still a cool stop to gauge the blogosphere’s buzz. Sort results by authority, tags, language, videos, etc…
Google Advanced Blog Search
Some believe that Google Blog Search has dealt a knock out blow to Technorati. No doubt blogsearch.google.com is a very cool conduit to identifying blogs and bloggers that might matter.
Facebook Create Campaign Tool
In the finest tradition of using free campaign creation tools to advise content creation, this tool is a gem. In the example screen capture here, I want to reach people between 18 and 40 years old in the United States who graduated from Indiana and like Basketball, Playing Basketball, College Basketball, or Play Basketball.
StumbleUpon Create Campaign Tool
Be a paid advertising UI squatter and mine buzz pockets for free. Just act like you’re going to create a campaign. Flipping through the category and subcategories, select the user interest groups you want to target.
StumbleUpon Discovery Bookmarking Tool
Join SU, install the toolbar and be the first to thumbs-up content.
The dropdown menu is among the most colorful category suggestion tools in existence. StumbleUpon Discovery Bookmarking Tool (or other communities) on suggested tags to find wonderful content, blog posts and authority users in the keyword space.
LinkedIn Answers Categories (must be logged in to LinkedIn)
Looking for a terrific business categorizations? Check out the way LinkedIn organizes businesses. While the “Answers section” is a walled garden, scrape the pages, post as your own private HTML and crawl with Google Keywords tool to mine outstanding keyword baskets by social input to each business category and subcategory.
Google Hot Trends
Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Take note that approximations are used for extrapolating these results. I love starting with trends-results and going back to the SU socially advised search function to find associated tags. Find content to scrape using Google AdWords Keyword tool and kaChing.
TrackUr: (OK not free but great) From tool maker and rep’ management authority Andy Beal, TrackUr is also killer as a buzz tracker front end for PPC content network laser-targeting. Search the indexable Internet on a small grid of keywords to locate every page holding the words.
Export the list to .csv and paste them into Google Content Network’s site targeting tool, to reveal which ones are AdSense publishers. Hat tip to David Szetala over at ClixMarketing for his content network magic.
Google Insights for Search
With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories and time frames. Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports. Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best over time and geographically.
Yahoo! Buzz – Top Overall Searches
Another social search engine in any category. A subject’s buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read.
Del.icio.us Popular Tags
Delicious is a classic social bookmarking service allowing users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a single source.
Amazon – Most Popular Tags
The Amazon tag cloud depicts users’ categorization of products. It provides cool shopping insight.
SEOmoz Popular Searches Tool
Rand Fishkin’s free tool is groovy in that it archives Google Hot Trends, Yahoo Buzz – Top Overall Searches, Del.icio.us Popular Tags, Amazon Popular tags and other BPM tag clouds. Search each of the channels by date for perspective on the evolution of hot.
Buzz Pocket Mining
While classic keyword research indexes keyword permutations users search for, Buzz Pocket Mining measures individual and community-wide interactions. Seriously powerful BPM tools are totally free. Happy mining everybody, and don’t forget to put on the hip waders!
