How to “Listen” on Twitter
Social media types are always talking about how to participate in online communities as a marketer. The first advice we give, is to listen. Listen? you’re thinking. The Internet is silent. The only noise is your iTunes in the background. So what do we really mean when we say listen?
Twitter is a global conversation about all sorts of things. Sometimes it’s about products or companies. But most of the time it’s socializing and networking. Social communities aren’t centered around making money. If all you talk about is your products people lose interest – unless your products are interesting to them.
Online communities are a great way to find groups of people and see what they community care about and get their feedback and input. See what they care about and write about. Most importantly what they value.
Here’s how to find groups on Twitter and start listening:
- Go to search.twitter.com and type in a term. Put it in quotes if you want to keep words together. Example, you want to reach blackberry enthusiasts. Type in blackberry. Read what people are writing. Look at the photo below to add Twitter search to your search bar so you don’t have to go to the site to do a Twitter search.
- “Follow” the influencers. That means see who is writing about the topic the most. To follow them be logged into your Twitter account. Click on their name and under their picture there’s a button that says Follow. Click it.
- Put RSS feeds on your company name, your competitors, and other terms you want to keep up on, regardless of who writes about it. On the right side there is a link to:
Feed for this query - Hash tags are ways to track a group of people talking about something specific. You put a pound sign in front of the tag in your tweet. People make up their own tags. Like if you’re at a conference (like MacWorld could be #MacWorld) and people who are there want to discuss it or others want to see what people what. To see the most popular tags right now see: http://hashtags.org
- Get email alerts on words you want to track on Twitter with http://tweetbeep.com
. Click that link and choose which feed reader to use from the dropdown menu at the top.
3 Responses to “How to “Listen” on Twitter”
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February 1st, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Once again, Janet–super helpful. Thanks.
February 7th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Great article Janet! I like the RSS idea for following a subject feed. One of my initial arguments against liking twitter in the beginning is it seems there are so many people talking and not many “listeners”. The whole producers of content and consumers of content balance always seemed way off. I’ve learned in my own way to be a consumer (listener) and a producer (content provider) and have enjoyed it much more.
Now, off to create some RSS feeds on my favorite subjects…
February 17th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Brad,
Nice to see you on Twitter – I enjoyed your post with your funniest tweets. I see I missed out on your sense of humor in the past.
Justin,
Thanks & I wish I could stop your comment from wrapping around the end of the post!
-Janet