Social Listening Just Got Easier With Bottlenose.com

Written By: Adam Dince

I don’t typically blog twice in one week, however, I couldn’t resist after discovering an incredible new social media app.  Yesterday afternoon, Klout notified me that I had a new perk available, so I decided to check it out.  To be honest, I got my hopes up for something big and was a little disappointed when I saw that the perk was to be a beta-user of a new social media app, bottlenose.com.  I mean come on—where’s my free ski vacation (note the sarcasm?).  Nevertheless, I’m now a beta-member and am so glad I took advantage of the perk.  Thanks @klout.

What The Heck Is A Bottlenose?

Essentially, Bottlenose is a social app/dashboard that allows you create business intelligence out of the social noise that exists on Twitter.  Intially, Bottlenose will attempt to identify topics that you’re interested in by crawling your Twitter feed and analyzing conversations along with hash-tags.  Once Bottlenose has identified the most relevant subjects to you, it displays them on the lower-left hand corner of your screen, which allows you to easily toggle between topics.  Furthermore, adding topics that Bottlenose didn’t catch during its initial crawl can be easily done through the “Add a topic” button”.

 

Keep in mind that the quality of data returned from bottlenose.com is dependent upon the number of users you follow on Twitter and their relationship to the discussions/topics that you’re engaged in or listening to.  Furthermore, bottlenose.com allows you to refine the topic feed results based on criteria (see example below).

 

To sum Bottlenose up, I’ll use their own words:

“Everyone has an opinion and something to say, often on many networks simultaneously. Bottlenose is how you make sense of all of the conversations you follow, and the trends they relate to.  Bottlenose is intelligent. Bottlenose is personalized. And If you have a large audience, follow lots of people and interests, or create a lot of social media content — Bottlenose is for you.” http://bottlenose.com/about

When To Use Bottlenose:

Bottlenose can be used for many reasons.  I am a total data geek but prefer to spend as little green as possible to get the data I need.  What I enjoy about Bottlenose and a wide array of other new social tools (e.g., twylah.com, kred.com, klout.com) is that they provide solid actionable data and best—they’re free! Below, I’ve listed some the ways that I plan on using Bottlenose in the near future:

Keyword Research:  Whether it be for organic or paid search optimization, it’s important to understand what’s being said about topics you’ll be optimizing.  Google AdWords keyword research tool and Bing’s AdCenter are solid resources for understanding how people have searched in the past.  However, as Google pointed out last year at a YouTube presentation, almost 20% of searches are new searches that have never been searched before.  So, how do you beat the competition and be the first to market for new search terms?  Social listening is a proven technique and a tool like Bottlenose can help you quickly identify what keywords are buzzing.

Refined Hash-Tag Research:  Twitter is full of distracting noise and to gain relevant followers, it’s important to use the most optimal hash-tags within your tweets.  So, how do you know which hash-tags gives you the most opportunity to reach your audience?  Through social listening tools and keyword research.  Simply adding a topic to your Bottlenose dashboard will unearth a plethora of relevant hash-tags for your tweets and even Facebook posts.

Sentiment Analysis:  We all want to write about topics that people are interested in—otherwise, what’s the point of writing?  After using Bottleneck to see what people are talking about and what words/hash-tags are usedmost frequent—you can analyze the Bottlenecks Twitter stream to conduct a contextual sentiment analysis about what people are saying on Twitter.  Furthermore, to take a deeper dive into the conversation, you can use other tools like Omgili.com to measure sentiment across blogs and forums.  See example below:

Content Marketing:  One of the biggest challenges that many of my friends in the digital space face is consistent writing.  Many times, when I ask colleagues why they don’t write, I hear “Well, I don’t know what to write about.”  I’ve been there too.  Writers block is an unpleasant dilemma to face—but do not fear—help is on the way.

If you’re active on Twitter—you’re a quarter of the way there.  I’m going to show you how to leverage your Twitter account through Web apps Twylah, Klout and Bottlenose.  If you haven’t signed up for Twylah—do it now!  Here’s an older blog post I wrote that provides insight on what Twylah is and how to use it to optimize your Twitter feed for organic search.

Let me present five simple steps to finding content ideas that will have a far reach, drive traffic to your site, and go viral.

• Know What You Influence:  Leverage Klout to see what topics it finds you influence
• Know What You Are Known For:  Use Twylah to find out what topics you frequently Tweet about
• Get Married: Marry similar Klout themes to Twylah topics
• Get Intimate:  Enter the married theme/topics into Bottlenose to drill down to hash-tag, keyword, and content theme ideas
• Rock The World:  Once you’ve identified relevant themes that people are buzzing about —start writing

In Closing:

It’s never been a better time to be a social data-geek.  Thanks to tools like Bottlenose, we all have access to more data than we can possibly consume.  The key is knowing how to draw the business intelligence from the massive amounts of data thrown our way.

I highly recommend getting on-board the Bottlenose train as soon as tickets are available.  If you’re also a beta-user and would like to share your learnings, I’d love to hear from you.

If you’ve found this article helpful, I’d greatly appreciate a share, like, +1 or all of the above.