Online, you will find millions of blogs, news websites and thousands of online wire services publishing press releases daily. How is it possible for you and your business to find anything that is interesting with all the information noise? How do you find information that is relevant to your business?
If you think that this is a huge problem, it is not and there’s a solution to it – Social Media (Web 2.0). With the help of Google blog search, Google Alerts, Twitter real time search and RSS (real simple syndication) to name but a few methods, you can find valuable and interesting information regarding people, companies, real-time news, what is happening right now somewhere in the world and what is the current trend at the moment.
These methods can also help you research what others are saying about you, your business, and your competition online. Find below some information on how you can use some of these methods to find a needle of information in a haystack of content.
How to find relevant content online
Blog search: One of the easiest ways to find interesting blog posts is to do a simple search on Google Blog Search or other relevant blog aggregator channels such as myScoop and Technorati. With most of these channels, you can bookmark any interesting posts that you can read/research at a later stage.
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.
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 directly link or from doing a simple search on RSS reader channels such as Google Reader. 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.
There’s many standalone RSS feed readers available that you can use such as Google Reader and Outlook. I’m using MobileRSS on my iPhone and MobileRSS HD on my iPad for RSS aggregation.
Twitter real-time search: The power of Twitter. Do you want to know what is happening right now this very minute about a specific topic or niche? 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.
There’s no “automatic” alerts feature on Twitter, but here’s a trick that you can use. You can view an RSS feed of the results when you have done a Twitter search. Use this RSS results (feed link) on a Google alerts and set your delivery preferences. Every time a new item is published to Twitter about your search term, you will get a notification by email about it.