The way most businesses manage their Twitter communications, usually comes down to three things: posting, monitoring and browsing. The posting of updates and tweets, sometimes through a scheduling tool such as Buffer and the browsing that takes place in 'realtime', usually on Twitter itself.
All three can be time-consuming, but Twitter monitoring is often the one that gets neglected the most when other responsibilities take priority. Users rarely have time to get a proper monitoring plan setup, instead relying on the 'mention' notifications to tell them when another user has mentioned them and requires a response.
Unfortunately, this means that many users are missing out on a whole host of opportunities to actively seek out other users, start conversations and even find new business leads.
Twitter moves extremely fast - around 350,000 tweets per minute, to be exact, and the 'shelf life' of a tweet is less than 18 minutes. But with a good Twitter Monitoring plan in place, it is easier than you think to cut through the noise and find only the tweets that matter to you and your business.
Best of all, it's not even that difficult to set a Twitter Monitoring strategy up and anyone can do it, regardless of their expertise. In Twitter itself, users can create searches in the search tool at the top of the page and save these, to ensure they get a better view of what's going on, even when they aren't online. There are also tools such as Tweetdeck which allow you to save those searches in columns to refer back to and scan on a regular basis. Twilert, is a tool which even allows you to save your searches and have them sent to you via email either in realtime as they happen, or in a daily or weekly digest. With so many tools available, it really is very simple to get searches setup to monitor on a regular basis.
So once you have employed the right tools, how do you know which searches to setup?
The 3 searches below will give you all of the formats you need to setup searches which gain you a 360 degree of not just your brand, but also your industry. They will help you to find out exactly who is talking about your brand, regardless or whether they remember to tag your handle. It will tell you what's being said around your industry and could even help you to find leads through just a few select keywords.
They are:
The Brand Name Search
According to research, 130 questions made by consumers to brands, are ignored every hour. The predominant reason? Brands simply don't realise the users are talking about them. All it takes is for a user to make a spelling mistake in the twitter handle, tag the wrong one, or not tag the handle at all, and the brand will be none the wiser that someone is talking about them. This is even worse if the user is trying to talk to the brand, as they will be left wondering why the brand didn't care enough to get back in touch. This is where the Brand Name Search comes in.
For example, I bet that renowned toy store FAO Schwarz wishes they had known about Athlete and broadcaster Justin Gimbelstob's visit to the store with his son but unfortunately, he didn't tag their Twitter handle.
However, if FAO Schwarz had setup the brand search, they wouldn't have missed a thing.
The brand search looks something like this:
'FAO Schwarz' OR 'FAO Schwartz' OR @FAOschwarz
This search would find all mentions of FAO Schwarz's Twitter handle, their brand name and any tweets where users had written a common misspelling of the name. By employing the 'OR' search operator, this also allows you to setup just one Twitter search which covers all angles, saving time and streamlining the number of feeds or alerts you need to monitor.
The Location Search
The location search is ideal for location-based businesses, those running events and anyone who is particularly interested in tweets that are occurring within a specific area.
Geolocation search within Twitter allows you to find tweets that have occurred in a certain location. For example, if you are a Pizza place in Shoreditch, you could find gems like the below, just by searching within the area for any tweets that contain the word 'pizza':
Twitter advanced search, allows you to do this quite broadly, by entering keywords and then selecting your location:
Twilert, the twitter monitoring and alert tool we mentioned earlier, also has a built-in geolocation filter which allows you to circle a much more specific area, anything from a shop, to a street, to a postcode, which can be really useful for tracking a specific conversation. For example, if you were holding an event at London ExCel, you may want to find tweets that have been sent directly from within the venue, as shown below, to ensure you get a 360 degree view of attendee feedback.
The Potential Customer Search
Another great thing about effective twitter monitoring, is that you can use it to surface potential leads. All you need to do this, is the right keywords that people would use to tweet about your product or service.
For example, someone who is interested in web hosting may tweet: 'Can anyone recommend a good web host for SMEs in the UK?'
Therefore, if you created a search with the keywords 'recommend' 'web host' 'UK' in Twitter, or another monitoring tool, you would soon surface a list of leads, ready for the taking, that look like the below:
It also helps you to get a feel for your industry to see who's being recommended and who isn't. Social proof is one of the strongest forms of recommendation available and this could tell you much more than just looking at a competitor's website or marketing materials alone.
Hopefully, this article has shown you the power of Twitter monitoring and the positive effect it could have on your brand communications.
So what are you waiting for? Start setting up the searches that matter to your business today and watch your brand reputation, customer service and social following improve as a result.