Mike Abasov

This post is a part of the “Twitter Monitoring Series.”

There is no brand that people don’t talk about on Twitter. You might not know it yet, but it is most probable that there are at least few tweets that mention your company or products, and you can you these tweets to get profit (not only in terms of money but also relationships and exposure).

There are 3 good techniques that can help you set up super-effective streams in HootSuite:

1. Search for your brand name. Search for your company’s name, your products’ names and your public people’s names. Use Twitter Search Operators like “OR” to combine different variations of the names in one stream.
2. Search for common misspellings. Sometimes people will misspell your name, but it doesn’t mean you have to loose those tweets. Search for common misspellings to get much more results and combine them in one stream to save space. For example, here are 2 different ways to search for Starbucks and 2 different results that you get:
   
   Note: Usually, it is not the best idea to correct misspellings of the people you don’t know, so I don’t advise you to tell every single person how to spell your brand name correctly. 
3. Search for you domain name. This wouldn’t work for everyone, but sometimes it is good to search for your domain name. Sometimes, people won’t write your name but will give a link to your website, and if your domain name is different from your company’s name, you can search for it too. On the image below, I’ve highlighted 2 tweets that would not have showed up in a regular “hootsuite” search stream: 
    
4. Specify language. Sometimes you might want to see only tweets in English. In this case, add “a” or “the” to the query which are distinctive elements of the language. 
5. Monitor the customers. Create a list of your customers and a tab with their tweets. See what they are interested in and get into discussions.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about monitoring your topic, so don’t forget to come by!

Twitter monitoring is definitely one of the most powerful social media tactics out there. This is the best way to easily get feedback, find customers, research competition and start effectively reaching out, engaging and building a community. And there is no doubt that HootSuite is the best tool you can use for Twitter monitoring.

To monitor effectively, HootSuite allows you to save your search queries as streams. Moreover, as you might have many and many different queries, you can use tabs to combine and divide everything into groups. This allows you to keep track of everything without any mess.

For example, you can create tabs for the mentions of your company, about your topic and/or about your competitors. Let’s see what we can find in each case.

So this week, I decided to talk about awesome Twitter monitoring techniques, and here is the list of the posts that I’ve written so far:

• How to Monitor Your Brand on Twitter?
• How to Monitor Your Topic on Twitter?
• How to Monitor Your Competition on Twitter?

There is one singe awesome tip that will make it incredibly easy for you to get into conversations with people you follow (even when there are a lot of them) without reading tons of useless tweets.

I use HootSuite for this and I think that this is the best tool ever, but if you know some other app that you can use, go for it! On the image below you can see my Home Feed filtered by a keyword. The keyword is a question mark. This filter brings up questions which people that I follow are asking. And if there is a question, you can answer it!

It is this easy: in 2 clicks and 1 character I turned many tweets that I can’t work with into a few engageable ones.

Don’t get me wrong. I still have fun reading the other tweets, but when I don’t have much time, I use this super-simple and super-efficient tip to start engaging is seconds!

What super-tips do you have?

Aslo check out “How to monitor everything on Twitter” series.

People keep creating content, and sometimes (most of the time) it is completely useless. For example, I’ve seen tens of absolutely similar demo videos of HootSuite. None of those people added any value to the material; they produced another boring tutorial that will be watched by about 17 people max. Lots of time and energy got wasted.

Don’t do this. If you have an idea about a post or a video, google it first! And then, only if it hasn’t been done by anyone or if you have something awesome to add, write it or tape it.

Otherwise, if you have nothing to make this content special, don’t waste your time on it. And if you think that this idea is really important to your readers, just post a link to someone who wrote about it before. It doesn’t mean loosing readers. It means sharing cool content and, maybe, building a new relationship with the blogger you have promoted. And we all know that these relationships are really important.

Here’s some more good stuff on the same topic by Derek J in his post “Stop Blogging About Blogging Already.”