How To Find Raving Fans For your Social Media Campaign

Whenever you’re faced with starting a new social media campaign for someone, you’ll have to find out where the communities in your industry are.

Here are a few tricks for finding fans in your industry.

1) LinkedIn Groups
The first and simplest way to find groups of people who are in your industry is to go to LinkedIn and search for groups in your desired industry. When you do the search you’ll receive a huge list of groups – some will fit your niche. Some won’t.

Spend some time reading the types of questions that people are asking. If you’re results are anything like mine you’ll see that recruiters and people looking for jobs tend to dominate the discussion. But there are tons of people who are out there actually looking for information that they can use in their day to day life.

Also see the types of discussions that are getting lots of traffic and responses – this is a a dead giveaway to the kind of “gifts” you should be donating to your new found community.

Remember that you’re goal here is to provide people with something that they are going to talk about – provide something in the same vein as what’s popular, but turn it on it’s head or get out there on the edge of what’s acceptable

If you think that you can add value to the conversation, then join the group.

Make sure that when you post, people have a way of joining you in other communities – twitter, blogging, facebook groups – whatever you’re using.

2) Forums
In every industry there are a set of the most forums where people go get their questions answered or spend time answering questions.

The easiest way to find these groups is by doing a quick google search with terms like this:
- allintitle:forum+sales
-vbulletin +project management

vbulletin is one of the most popular forum applications out there and just about every forum that uses it says “Powered by vBulletin” at the bottom.

Once you’ve identified a set of four or five of the most popular forums in your industry, do a search to see who’s talking about your product or if they’re talking about it all. Just like in your LinkedIn search you want to see what people are asking about. This gives you an idea of the pain that’s burning through these folks daily lives.

Also, take note of the people who have answered the most questions – these are the people who are the “thought leaders” on the board and could quite possibly be though leaders in your industry. Take a note to reach out to this person in future – both on and offline.

Be very careful that you are providing something of value to these forums. It becomes very obvious very quickly when you are doing little more than providing links back to your site. You’ll get banned pretty fast. Not something that you’re looking for.

3)Bloggers
Somebody has got a blog somewhere about what you’re doing. Do a search for the bloggers in your industry and take note of their blog rolls. This tells you who they’re listening to and the conversation that they’re participating in.

If you’re going to reach out to bloggers in your space keep this in mind. Bloggers/Journalists/Researchers:

- want something to talk about
- want to make money at what they do
- want to be recognized as thought leaders

Give them the nuggets that will fuel their minds and pocketbooks and you’ll have an easier entry into the group.

Remember you’re asking to be let in to a community that could possibly have existed for years. Keep your intentions honest and be sure to bring something of value to the table. Hopefully it’s something that complements and doesn’t threaten what they’re up to.

Once you’ve identified the blogs you like, use the Link: operator in Google or Yahoo’s Site Explorer to find the sites that are linking back to your target blog. This will give you a lot of insight into who’s talking about your topic.

4) Yahoo and Google Groups
Yes. People still use these listserve groups. Every time I sit down to find people I almost forget to look at these groups. But they are there and they are active.

Search your industry, product or topic at Yahoo or Google. When you find one, check to see who’s involved or if any of the topics are relevant to what you do.

These groups are generally heavily moderated, so fire off a note to the administrator to see what the rules are about the group.

Your strategy here is similar to the other ones – figure out who the key players are and then add something of value to their conversation.

5) Social Bookmarking sites
Do a search on Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Reddit, and Delicious to find out who’s bookmarked ( and whose been bookmarked) in your industry.

Those people are the folks that care about what you’re going to be talking about.

Follow them. Look at what they’re reading and read it for yourself. Some people will tag bloody anything, but you want the folks that are singularly focused on your industry. Those are your people with Otaku.

6) Offline Associations
Don’t forget that for every industry there is an association for it. They take many forms – from old industry associations to new tweet up groups.

These are easy to find with a simple “industry + association” search. They’ll have newsletters, forums, blogs, and best of all actual meetings where you can get involved.

What tools do you use to find small groups of raving fans?