The easiest tools to understand digital trends revolve around SEO and keyword traffic. They include Google’s line of keyword tools (estimator, ad campaign, ad planner, insights, and trends) as well as site specific services such as Compete and Quantcast.

These keyword metrics can be applied to existing marketplaces that you are trying to engage with, or to identify if a market opportunity/gap exist. Ideally you would look at 5 to 20 communities, influencers, and like-minded businesses from a digital perspective to formulate if a gap exists.

Once a gap is identified, you can then run through a traditional set of business related questions to validate if your start-up can monetize the opportunities surrounding any specific gap.

Social Mention provides valuable tools for researching basic social volume elements. Google alerts also provides a method for tracking key individuals and brands.

All of the major APIs are also worth looking at. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, etc all provide additional data points that are not in the general user experience. For the right startup, these numbers can provide amazing clarity.

This type of structured strategy is built into how we think at Social Media Kit, so let us know if we can do something for your launch!

Social Media Kit was created around the concept that businesses need to understand the real world impact that social media has on multiple aspects of business.

One of the largest changes that social media has accelerated is how people find information. Thanks to search engines like Google, a majority of the population now turns to the web in search of critical information.

If you have a new product or an important brand name (it could even be a key executive), the social media trend has created a wave of people who are looking on these search engines at an alarming rate. When people look for information about “product X”, we expect to get information about what we looked for.

The problem with this is that most companies fail to establish a healthy product foundation online. They can spend millions of dollars creating the best brand or widget ever… and fail to understand that it could be victimized by an unethical competitor, a disgruntled x-employee or even a simple consumer mis-understanding.

Community

On a more positive note, don’t miss the opportunity of interacting with interested users. Regardless of the product, company or niche: there are communities of users that want to be involved. This presents many benefits such as better usability groups, consumer feedback, event support, evangelism and general word of mouth.

How valuable do you think it would be if  you could have hundreds of interested users help you develop your next product, test it for you, and even act as a first tier marketing channel using word of mouth?

Engagement

Users want to use the tools they use, not learn how to use another widget or join another community. When seeking to maximize on social media (whether an internal or external project) – keep this in mind. Various online metrics can be analyzed and segmented to create a tactical list of popular social sites, keywords users a interested in, tools they use to interact, and even time of day.

How valuable would it be to take your client or employee list and tactically know that 45% are on Facebook, 23% are on Linkedin, 11% are on Twitter… and 6% are on some site you never even heard of?

Search Engine Optimization, both global and local

There are thousands of different social media sites out there with hundreds of millions of user profiles (billions actually.) Each of those sites and profiles represents a percentage of search engine traffic happening on services like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Some of those services are favored by mobile users, while other sites are favored in certain cities for local search results.

How valuable is it to be able to reach specific audiences in specific cities or tactically penetrate into specific real-world events?

Conclusion

Rather than think of social media as a mythical creature, think of it as a basic tool just like your notepad, laptop computer, or telephone. Try to think of it as a method to quantify and refine your current communication process. If you can understand the qualities of the tools you are looking at ( knowing where, when, why and what people are using tools for), then you can tactically achieve measurable results for your business.