Determining if social media should be integrated into your aviation marketing strategy starts with listening to what’s being said and evaluating if your company should be part of the conversation.

Social media is full of challenges. It’s continuous, messy, unpredictable, and non-linear, requiring aviation marketers to adopt new strategies, measurement metrics, organizational structures, and technology to successfully integrate social media into their marketing mix.

Integrating social media requires resources and commitment

Before undertaking an expensive and resource-intensive effort, aviation marketers should listen to what the socially active buyers are discussing before jumping into the fray.

There are several ways to start the social media listening process by using free or paid tools. Free tools require more work on the part of the user to interpret the data and make strategic sense of it. Paid tools do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and can shorten the learning curve when deciding to include social media as part of your marketing mix.

Free social media listening tools:

1. Google advanced search – Perform broad based or narrow searches by key word and search phrases
2. Search.twitter.com – Search for the latest tweets and posted links
3. Tweetbeep.com – Keep track of conversations that mention you, your product or company
4. Tweetscan.com – Search for tweets by individuals or companies
5. Tweetdeck.com – App that brings flexibility and insight to twitter power users
6. Socialmention.com – Real-time social media search and analysis
7. Howsociable.com  – Calculate your brand impact on the social web, upgrade to paid subscription for brand comparison analysis
8. Addictomatic.com – Pick a topic and get postings from search engines and social communities
9. Blogtrends.com – search for top rated blogs by key word or industry
10. Technorati.com – Blog search engine listing trending and descending blogs, videos, and blogosphere items

Paid social media tools:

1. Nmincite.com  – Equips large enterprises with “social media intelligence” that enables them to realize a sustainable competitive advantage through high-quality metrics, insights and advice
2. Radian6.com – Radian6 enables organizations to become “socially engaged enterprises”, with the power to understand and gain insights about social media through metrics, measurement, sentiment and analytics reporting
3. Nielsen.com – Measurement methodologies analyze consumer behavior and trends, advertising effectiveness, brand advocacy, social media buzz and more to provide a 360-degree view of how consumers engage with online media
4. Trackur.com – Monitor your reputation news mentions, PR campaigns, employee posts, and your competition
5. Lithium.com – Platform of integrated products for monitoring, hosting and managing social media conversations

Listening will give insight into connecting with dynamic customers.  From there you can start to build your social media strategy and the inventory of resources and tools needed to achieve your business objectives.

photo credit: B Rosen via photo pin cc