Social Media Buzz Pocket Mining: The New Keyword Research

The fundamental premise of search marketing remains revolutionary and timeless. We research what people care about and market (organic and paid) directly to SERPs for their queries. Classic keyword research reveals search frequency and phrase permutations to gauge marketplace interest. Lateral stemming thesaurus tools help us brainstorm frequently used alternate keyword clusters. For instance if your 're marketing "catering services," some customers are also searching for "wedding food" and "party planning." This is not earth shaking news to most.

However, keyword research's social-climbing step sister, "Buzz Pocket Mining" is not-so-quietly becoming the 800 pound gorilla next door. Buzz Pocket Mining refers to tools, usually free, that take the temperature of a social community's chatter patterns. What hot topics are people chirping about enmasse? What do social site SERPs reveal about the marketplace for your product? Who owns the thought leading authority profiles in any given community for a topic? What are the blogs of note? These are crucial questions for social search marketers who are considering forays into paid and organic social media marketing.

Each community has different methods and tools available to measure it's users' Buzz Pockets. One of my favorites is StumbleUpon's socially moderated SERPs. It's free, so let's have a look .

First, navigate to the StumbleUpon buzz page. This illustrates, at an overview level, what tags and sites are hot in SU. As an aside, getting your site to this level can mean 5K to 20K unique visitors in a day. Type gibberish into the search box (outlined in red) and submit.



The search results for this nonexistent keyword offer a treasure trove of information revealing what StumbleUpon users are interested in. Depending on the demographic of the product you're marketing, this insight can truly be worth its weight in gold. The font size is proportional to community interest-level.



Ok, say you're marketing candy bars. Yay! There's a relatively small (but statistically significant) chocolate Buzz Pocket in StumbleUpon. Click on "chocolate" in the Tag Cloud. The results are exciting. First, you'll note the SU users who are interested in chocolate. Yup that's me. I'm active in SU and happen to love chocolate. Make note of these users for one- to-one conversation marketing later. These are potentially valuable evangelists for your candy product. They've expressed interest in chocolate by the sites they've bookmarked and tagged.



Further down the page is a list of featured chocolate sites. Note: getting your site on this page can result in 300-1000 unique visitors over the course of several days, depending on the size of the Buzz Pocket. There's even more word-of-mouth value to be gained here. Click on the Chocolate Travel Tours link. Now you've identified a blog comments-thread to participate in order to grow your involvement in the chocolate blog community.



Each social community presents a different methodology to mine: it's Buzz Pockets for social media marketing. The insights gleaned are invaluable while researching the likely success of SMO efforts. While traditional keyword research remains the cornerstone of search marketing, Buzz Pocket Mining is becoming more and more important as "marketing to the social graph" comes on line and evolves.