The Best Practice to Drive Highly Targeted Traffic and Discover Leads in Facebook Groups, Linkedin Groups and Forums
-- a guide to use SoEngaging for intelligent support (9/15/2014)

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Many people post requests in online communities for products and/or services that you offer no matter what industry you're in and where your business is operated. You just need to find them. For each request there're tens and even hundreds of other people who follow the thread and are also interested in the same products and/or services.

1. If you're looking for potential customers (B2C), they're on Facebook groups and forums.
2. If you're looking for customers for your local business, they're on many Facebook local groups.
3. If you're looking for B2B prospects, they're on Linkedin groups and forums.

SoEngaging is a powerful platform to drive highly targeted traffic and discover leads in online communities. This guide will explain the process step-by-step. The same process can also be used to find coming events or free stuff in a particular city, or anything you're interested in.

To start, click on the home page to login.

1. Find the Right Online Communities

Finding the right online communities to join is the first step to drive highly targeted visits and discover leads online. Facebook groups are the #1 source for online conversations.

1.1 Gain Insights into Your Facebook groups

After login, click Gain Insights into Your Facebook groups to load the Facebook groups which you're already a member of. It may take about 30 seconds or more to evaluate and rank the groups dependent on how many groups you belong to.

Group insights are shown on Your Facebook groups page, which ranks the groups by the numbers of members a post will reach. It also shows the analytics of each group in terms of engagement and the best times for engagement.

1.2 Find more Facebook groups

Click Find more Facebook groups at the lower left corner on the welcome page to search related Facebook groups by keywords. You could easily find 100 Facebook groups in any niche. For instance, there're more than 200 Facebook groups related to travel in Colorado.

A list of Facebook groups is shown instantly when keywords are typed into the search box. The search results also display whether you're already a member of a group. A new window is opened when clicking a group name so you can do a quick scan to decide whether you want to join the group. You'll find and join dozens of good groups in just a few minutes. A group can be bookmarked for later review.

The new groups once accepted will be shown on Your Facebook group with analytical stats.

1.3 Gain insights into your Linkedin groups

Click Gain Insights into Your Linkedin groups to load the Linkedin groups which you're already a member of. It may take about 30 seconds or more to evaluate and rank the groups dependent on how many groups you belong to. A Linkedin member could belong to up to 50 groups.

1.4 Monitor RSS feeds

You could also monitor RSS feeds on SoEngaging. For instance, we could use RSS feed to monitor questions on quora.com.

1.5 Monitor millions of forums

SoEngaging automatically finds related threads on millions of forums by keywords when a project is created.

2. Monitor Threads by Project

A user could belong to hundreds of Facebook groups in many niches for many reasons. A project organizes social monitoring by keywords.

2.1 Create a new project

Click Projects tab at the upper left corner then click Create a new project link to create a new project.

1. type a project title, keywords and URL (the page you want to promote) - choosing the right keywords is critical for finding the right threads. It is a ongoing process to perfect the keyword list for monitoring.
2. select your Facebook and Linkedin groups you want to monitor - there're two types of groups on Facebook: discussion groups and marketplace groups. We're more interested in monitor discussion groups that usually have less than 50 daily post count. Most of Linkedin groups are worthy monitoring. You could monitor up to 50 Facebook groups and 25 Linkedin groups in one project.
3. check the targeting countries - when at least one targeting country is checked, the project will search related threads on millions of forums,
4. click Add button to create a new project.

It may take one minute to create a new project while gathering data from many sources. Now the project Socail Media Marketing is created. And the user is directed to My Posts page ready to share posts to multiple groups.

Click New Threads at the upper left corner to view the relevant threads we're monitoring.

There're three action items for each thread:

1. Watch - mark a thread as watched shown on Watched page.
2. Ignore - delete a thread.
3. Research - locate related research notes in FAQ knowledge base and a list of related replies saved in the past.

Move the mouse over to the lightblue Traffic bar to view the numeric value of the traffic (1 - 10 scale).
Move the mouse over to the lightblue Target Traffic bar to see the target traffic in percentage.
Move the mouse over to the lightblue Thread Growth bar to see how the thread will likely grow.

2.2 Filter the results by sites

Click Site Info to check the sites you want the threads to be shown on New threads page.

Each site is measured by:

1. Traffic - the volume of the traffic in a scale of 1 - 10.
2. Target Traffic - percentage of traffic from the targeting countries.
3. Interest - the average number of posts per thread.
4. Interactivity - the average ratio of the number of posts vs. the number of participants. The value for a site is 1 if there's no interaction. Move the mouse over to the lighblue bar to see the numeric value of interactivity.

3. Organize Monitored Threads

3.1 Organize the threads by topics

Go to Research tab to create a list of topics to organize monitored threads.

3.2 Track the watched threads

A thread is marked as watched by clicking Watch link or by saving reply to the thread. Watched thread page tracks all watched and participated threads grouped by topics for easy followup. This is also the place to add and track the new conversations initiated by you.

3.3 Develop knowledge base for FAQs

Tens or even hundreds of new conversations are initiated every day for many popular topics, but 20% of answers often cover 80% of questions. It is more productive to develop a knowledge base for frequently asked questions. Click a topic ("Facebook campaign" for instance) to store your research notes and reference links for the topic.

In this quick guide, we've walked through the steps to monitor Facebook groups and Linkedin groups using SoEngaging platform.

to start.