Community managers aim to establish authority and offer value to a relevant community by way of sharing awesome, complimentary content, solve problems as they arise, and monitor and moderate topical conversations.

Deep community managers know these forms of engagement must be tethered to actionable marketing key performance indicators (KPIs), making them community marketers, as well as managers. But at its core, the function of any Commnunity Manager is to remain loyal to that initial need for brands to connect with relevant people in a meaningful way.

In B2B Community Manager’s Guide To Identifying True Twitter Friends, we explored how to leverage a variety of listening tools and user-powered directories to identify target audiences based on topical conversations and self-tagged categories.

In this second installment, we’ll learn how to hone in on B2B targets based on content consumed and authority users they follow– continuing down the road with our example of Company X, which is marketing to owners of wineries.

Let’s get started.

Identifying Target Audiences By Content Consumed

Scope out content aggregators for awesome, relevant content your target audience might gravitate towards. Sites such as AllTop, Buzzfeed, Digg, Reddit, and the like pre-vet content by category and by propensity to go viral, or at least to be “cool.”

Pique your interest? Check it out.

Plugging the article URL into Backtweets.com will show you everyone who’s tweeted that piece of content.

Maybe Beau isn’t our target audience, but I’d bet you a bottle of ‘97 Screaming Eagle Cab Sauv (priced at a cool $2.5k) he follows them.

Ready?

In the time it takes to pop a bottle, we found 76 wineries on Twitter, worth following, as vetted by our pal Beau the wine enthusiast and social media savvy guy. This is just the tip of the potential-Twitter-BFFs-iceberg.

Socialmention.com and BlogPulse.com are other awesome resources worth checking out:

Filter by sweet advanced criteria:

Identifying & Mining Power User Profiles

Just as we did with Beau, we can vet the profiles, lists, hashtags, and content created and shared by super power users. For the wine industry, folks like Rick Bakas (@RickBakas) and Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) are smart starting points.

Like Beau, these power users might not be the people we want to whom we aim to sell our stainless steel tanks. They’re more useful for…

• Tracking topical hashtags
• Mining elucidating Twitter lists and similar followers
• Identifying reputable or viral content
• Honing in on tight pockets of target audiences

These power users might not be your customers, but they’re the people your customers are probably listening to. Let’s dive in.

Power users aside, feel free to qualify any wine enthusiast (e.g. Beau, or now, Jordan) you come across in your research with authority ranking services like Klout, PeerIndex.com, and Twittercounter.com.

Similar to vertical celebs, journalists and critics are terrific leads to follow. They’re paid to provide opinions and advice for the world to soak up. And guess what? They’re also on Twitter. Visit JournalistTweets.com and MuckRack.com, specify your category, and comb through the goods.

Once you’ve identified sweet pockets of your audience by way of conversation or category, it’s up to you how you proceed. Will you reach out with a branded avatar on behalf of your company, or sneak in more subtly as your own charming self? There’s cases to be made for both.

Whatever the method, the first step’s well underway: you’re learning where you want to be and who you want to befriend. Arguably more than half the battle! Go get’em, marketers.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing