The web is noisy and chaotic with information. Online, you will find thousands of blogs, news channels and many online wire services publishing press releases, news articles and other related content daily. How is it possible for you and your business to find anything that is interesting with all the information available? How do you find information that is relevant to your business that you can use, curate and share with your target audience to support your digital marketing efforts?
With the help of Google Search, Google Alerts, Twitter real time search and RSS (real simple syndication) it’s quite easy to find content that is relevant, newsworthy, and real time. Using these channels you can find valuable and interesting information regarding people, companies, news, what is happening right now somewhere in the world and what is currently trending.
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These channels can also help you research what others are saying about you, your business, and your competition online. Here’s a couple of tips on using these channels to find a needle of information in a haystack of content.
How to find relevant content online
Google search: One of the easiest ways to find interesting and relevant content is to do a simple search on Google. Use a combination of keywords relevant to your query and use many of the vertical search options (news, videos, images) directly on Google to filter what you are looking for. Looking for recent content? You can even filter the results by country and time. Using these search options on Google is powerful and one of the quickest ways to find relevant content.
Google Alerts: You can use Google Alerts to set up “alerts” so that you receive an email when new information regarding any topic is published online. You can set up alerts for brand mentions, blog posts or any topic so that you are notified when something new is published. These alerts can be setup so that you are immediately notified when there’s an update or you can select to have a daily summary sent to you.
Google Alerts is also excellent in tracking your own name or brand where you can be notified as soon as you are mentioned in content that Google has indexed.
RSS aggregation: Another way to stay informed of new content is with RSS aggregation. The social media sphere lives and breathes RSS. RSS can be used in couple of different ways. Almost every blog has a form of RSS integration, which can either be accessed through a direct link or from doing a simple search on RSS reader channels such as Feedly.com. Once you have accessed the RSS feed of a blog, you can choose if you want to subscribe to that feed using a RSS reader so that you are notified when new blog posts are published.
Twitter real-time search: This is the power of Twitter. Do you want to know what is happening right now this minute about a specific topic? Do a search on Twitter’s search engine to find all the information as it happens in real-time. You can use the advanced search properties to find out exactly what you are looking for and also filter the results by location.
There’s a lot of noise on Twitter so use the advanced search features when doing a search or create a list of specific Twitter users you want to follow. Following specific lists makes it easy to find the exact type of content you are looking for.
Curating content in your digital marketing campaign is a great way to keep your campaign active and to share relevant and interesting information with your target audience. Make it a habit to listen more closely what is being talked about via the news and how you can use that content in your digital marketing campaign. If the content is newsworthy and trending at the moment, you can get more eyeballs reading your content.
