Mike Abasov

Continuing the “Twitter Monitoring Series.” Check out the other posts for the basic things implemented in the following advices.

You can learn a lot from your competitors. Businesses should monitor what is happening in the market, so here are a few things that make monitoring easy:

1. List your competitors. Create a private list of your competition and a stream for it. See what they tweet about, how they act and how you can use that to your advantage.
2. Search for brand names. Set up a search using the previous tips and examples to monitor what people are saying about your competition. Sometimes, they’ll be looking for alternatives or complaining about bad service, and this is a great opportunity for your company to turn these people into your customers.

Here is an awesome search stream that Toyota could use to monitor people talking about Honda (see an opportunity in the first tweets?):

This post ends the series. If there is anything else you’d like to know, tell me, and I might write about it too. Also, take a look at my super-engaging-tip.

Continuing the “Twitter Monitoring Series.”

Search for people talking about your topic (e.g. free website builders) and you will find many potential customers that you can approach. You will also be on top of all trends and know what’s happening in the industry. Let’s use the HootSuite keywords tool to set up a stream for “website builder,” “free cms,” “create website.”

The problem with this search is that people tweet A LOT about this, and it becomes impossible to follow. There are 3 things you can do to make your search awesome:

1. Divide. Instead of using one combined search query, try using 3 separate. Here is the stream for “website builder.”
   
2. Use question marks. Add a question mark to the query, and you will only see people asking questions.
   
3. Cut the links. This move will save you from most of the spam, blog posts and other irrelevant tweets. Add “-filter:links” to cut off any messages with links. You can also write “-http” to save space.
   
4. Use Klout. You can filter your stream by Klout Score to see tweets from influential people. This can help to find high-profile customers or potential clients.
   
   Note: not all of your customers are going to have a high Klout Score. The relationship looks like this: the average Klout Score of the customers is as high as geeky the brand/topic is.

This is all for today. Please share your tips in the comments below or/and share this article with your friends, if you like it! Tomorrow I’ll talk about monitoring your competition.

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?