Why Twitter?
As obvious from the above graph from Statistica, Twitter is the fourth (technically 3rd because the 3rd one is Facebook messenger, which should be under Facebook) most used social media app in the United States.
This micro-blogging giant is extremely popular for its high user engagement rate.
Brand managers love to use it because:
- It is free.
- It allows you to share branded content. Try promoting your brand on Reddit and you will understand why Twitter is easier and more brand-friendly. 🙂
- It has more than 350 million active users.
- A lot of companies love using Twitter to provide better customer services to your social media audience.
- A study conducted by Gartner has concluded that 19% of retail banks have a dedicated Twitter customer service handle.
- According to Twitter’s latest quarterly report, the engagement rate of ads has increased by 27% whereas the cost per engagement has gone down by 9%. This means your Twitter marketing strategy will cost you less but give you more benefits than last year!
- The report also mentions that the video views have increased by 62%. People wanting to know how to be successful on Twitter should try to post more videos including product demos, tips and tricks, hacks, reviews, etc.
- A blog by the micro-blogging giant claims that 40% of Twitter users make a purchase after they see a tweet from an influencer. No wonder why Twitter social media listening is so important. You obviously don’t want to miss out on those leads, right?
- According to Statistica, the US has the most number of Twitter users. See the image below:
Is Twitter social listening really important?
A lot of brands and businesses are still chasing the Facebook audience. Because obviously, the number of Facebook users is much more and the time they spend on it is high too as compared to Twitter.
One thing you must note here is that Facebook users are more interested in catching up with the lives of their family members, friends, and acquaintances. But, Twitter is a no-nonsense platform that provides real-time information and no other social media platform can beat it. That’s its uniqueness.
The above stats have made it pretty clear why you should track your Twitter mentions and craft better Twitter marketing strategies to expand your reach and emerge as a modern, customer-friendly, ‘cool’ brand.
But how do you do that?
What Twitter search hacks can you use to search for potential leads?
How can you ensure that your social media team comes up with fantastic content that will generate maximum engagement?
How can you use Twitter for business marketing?
What steps can you follow to track your competitors, analyze their strategies, and learn from them?
What trending hashtags can you use to target the right audience?
Don’t get overwhelmed; it isn’t that difficult.
Twitter listening tools can make it much easier for you to track the conversations around your brand, your competitors, and the keywords related to your business. These tools will help you understand the sentiment, reach, and response of those tweets, so you can figure out how well your Twitter marketing strategy is doing.
In this article, we will provide you with pro tips and tricks on how to be successful on Twitter using Twitter listening tools (which are basically social listening tools).
Let’s begin!
Benefits of Twitter monitoring and listening?
Hey. Don’t get confused. Monitoring and listening are almost the same thing but, as expected, listening includes a detailed analysis of the social media interactions happening around your brand and keywords related to your business. Read this article for detailed information on social listening versus social media monitoring.
Provide better customer services
This is a very obvious benefit of twitter monitoring and most big businesses are already doing it.
They have a dedicated social media customer service desk for tracking Twitter mentions and replying to messages, complaints, issues, suggestions, etc. They constantly track Twitter mentions and respond to them as soon as possible. They have a dedicated crisis management team that uses social listening to help brand managers find out what people are saying about their brand on Twitter and other social media.
Once you come to know about the complaints and issues that your buyers are facing, reach out to the complainants immediately, and assure them that you are working on it. Once you have addressed their concerns, inform them, and thank them for their patience.
Do it socially. Let your potential buyers see how responsible and customer-friendly you are. This will help you build a positive reputation and emerge as a business-worthy brand. Soon, you will get numerous customer advocates who will recommend you to their circle. Read this article to learn how social listening helps increase customer advocacy.
Please note: You don’t always have to be extremely serious and professional with your social audience. Humor works too! See the example below:
Discover what people are saying about you
This is where social listening will help.
Tracking direct mentions is easy. In most cases, people are going to directly tag you in their tweets. But what about those posts where people won’t tag you? And those where they may use a wrong Twitter handle?
You can use specialized social listening tools to track tweets that are not addressed to your handle or where the user has used a wrong Twitter has used a wrong handle.
Hey. don’t assume that such cases are rare and you can safely ignore them! You must not ignore even a single such tweet because the unattended customers can gather to form an army and roast you badly there.
Don’t trust us? Well, you should read about the Dell Hell incident in which just one unhappy Dell customer started a blog named Dell Hell and made it popular enough to get his story picked by giant Media houses. See an example below.
If you are looking for Twitter search hacks that can help you dig out such unmentioned conversations that can severely impact your reputation, don’t worry. All you need is a good social listening tool. We have mentioned them towards the end of the article.
Read on.
Use Twitter search hacks to look for product improvement ideas
Big corporations have already started asking their brand managers to find out what people are saying about their brand on Twitter by using social listening tools. You should do that too!
See the tweet below by IBM where it is asking people to suggest what kind of content they want to see.
The above image makes it clear that Twitter can be a good source of information about a brand or product because Twittratis love to voice their opinion, even if it is rude or irrational. But, they can genuinely help you identify the flaws in your product/service that you need to fix if you want it to be successful.
Improve your Twitter marketing strategy by gaining insights from your competitors
Honestly, unless you are a medium or big-size business with a decent customer base, the above-mentioned ideas may not work for you. Not many buyers would be approaching you on Twitter with their problems.
So, should you just keep tweeting, retweeting, and replying to whatever comments you get? Or would you like to take proactive steps towards Twitter listening? By being proactive we mean that you won’t sit around doing what you have been doing until now. You will follow your successful competitors and learn some tips from them on how to be successful on Twitter.
Wait! They aren’t going to offer you personal coaching. 🙁
You have to do it discreetly and social listening tools can help you with this.
Just like you monitor your own Twitter account, you can create searchers to monitor your competitors’ accounts too.
You can’t imagine how much you can learn from your competitors who have been quite successful on Twitter.
- See what kind of content they share and evaluate which types generate maximum engagement. This can help you improve your content creation strategy. The better content you share, the more engagements you will get and the more your buyers and prospects will admire you.
- Are your competitors hosting events/sales/quizzes/promotions/webinars on Twitter? If yes, is it helping them? If yes, probably you too include them in your Twitter marketing strategy.
- Which hashtags are they using? Should you use them too?
- How frequently are they posting?
- Are they just replying to tweets or are they proactively engaging with their followers, customers, and prospects like retweeting humorous content shared by their followers? Proactive interactions help you create friendly relationships with your followers and that’s why we highly recommend it to people/businesses who want to learn how to be successful on Twitter.
- Are they participating in industry-related discussions? If so, is it helping them? Can you do that too? What will be the consequences?
- What are the major issues that people are mentioning about your competitors? Maybe they have a very short warranty. If you discover such issues, you can immediately approach their unsatisfied buyers with a longer warranty period offer. You could win you some business!
Please note: Do it as neutrally (or discreetly) as possible because you don’t want your powerful competitor to do the same to you.
- What things buyers dislike the most about your competitors. Expensive product/service, frequent glitches in their software, delayed response, no or poor instructions for users; whatever the issue is, make sure you do not have the same. And, as mentioned above, inform their dissatisfied customers that they will not have these issues if they choose you.
Check out this article for more detailed information.
See the image below. Burger and pizza joints will never come up with such tweets because their competitor got roasted badly!
Twitter listening can help you discover new leads
Wondering what Twitter search hacks have made your competitor so successful on Twitter or any other social media platform?
The only hack they are using is Twitter listening. They are not simply monitoring their Twitter mentions. Instead, they are using social listening tools for Twitter to look for tweets where people are asking about recommendations regarding the products/services you deal in. They are participating in those discussions and recommending themselves. They are participating in general discussion regarding the keywords relevant to their business. And, they are getting business from such interactions because obviously, they have already earned a solid reputation on Twitter.
Don’t get disappointed; there is still a lot of scope for you. Not everyone can afford them. Plus, if you approach them before your competitor does, you may get lucky enough to be chosen!
See this:
Another way you can use Twitter for business marketing is by tracking your competitors’ unhappy customers and approaching them with a better offer. You can use Twitter listening tools to track the mentions of your competitors. Tools like Notifier are smart enough to help you understand the sentiments of these posts without going through each of them. You can then exclude the positive ones and check the ones with negative sentiments. These people are your potential leads. These people are probably dissatisfied enough to give you a chance!
Well, don’t get disappointed if you don’t get business from such interactions. You are still creating brand awareness and maybe diverting more traffic to your website!
Here are some tips that can help you build Twitter following for your startup.
Social listening on Twitter is important to improve your reputation
As we mentioned above, the only reason why your competitors get more leads and business from Twitter (or any other social media platform) is because they have worked hard to create a strong reputation for themselves. You need to do that too if you want to be successful on Twitter.
Here is how you can utilize Twitter social listening for it:
- Use social listening tools to identify discussions where people are asking about tips and tricks, hacks, or general information related to your business. Participate in those discussions. It will help increase awareness of your brand. Plus, Twitteratis will start perceiving you as a genuine, customer-friendly brand that likes to help others instead of just asking for business.
- Social listening on Twitter can help you identify industry-related discussions such as webinars, podcasts, seminars, etc. Participate in relevant ones and make yourself heard. Your competitors will soon start taking you more seriously. Plus, you never know you could get some indirect business or an acquisition proposal, etc.
- Create content that helps your followers. Such content should dominate your tweets, especially when you are a less-known brand. When you create powerful and helpful content, you will obviously get more followers. People will start looking at you as a knowledgeable company. Come up with humor, free ebooks, self-assessment quizzes, ‘did you know’ facts, latest news, audio or video lessons, etc. to help your followers learn something new. They will love you for this.
This article has some more pro tips that will help you build your reputation on Twitter and other social platforms.
- Use Twitter search hacks to identify the influencers of your industry
Influencer marketing has become extremely popular in the past few years. 89% of the brands that have tried it, have agreed that they have received as good ROI (or even better) as what the other marketing strategies offer.
As per Bigcommerce, Instagram is the most preferred social media channel for influencer marketing, followed by YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and Twitter.
Although the microblogging giant stands at the fifth position for influencer marketing, Twitter claims that nearly 40% of Twiterratis purchase a product as a result of a direct tweet from their influencer.
Want to know how to be successful on Twitter using influencer marketing?
All you need to do is to set up alerts for relevant keywords using social listening tools for Twitter. You can then track the people who use these keywords the most. Select the ones who have a large following. These people are your influences. You need to partner with them so that they can promote your product or services in their tweets, videos, blogs, etc.
Now that you have understood why Twitter listening is important, let’s help you get started!
Social listening tools for Twitter
If you are looking for free social listening tools for Twitter, you don’t need to, because Twitter has its own tool that lets you do some basic level of monitoring and listening. TweetDeck is also very similar to Twitter’s own search tool except that it offers more flexibility and better filters.
We hope you know that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck and it is free!
So, here is how you can search for popular hashtags, phrases, etc. You can filter the results based on the date range, language, authors, location, as well as their engagement rate.
Since TweetDeck is a free social media management tool for Twitter, many buyers prefer using it instead of paying for a tool that will basically do the same. But, that’s not a great idea!
As you can expect from any free social media listening tool (including Google Alerts), they offer only basic services. They have too many flaws such as inadequate search capabilities, inadequate filters, etc. See the image below; someone has pointed out that Twitter can’t search for posts where people have misspelled your brand name or have used synonyms of the keywords that you are looking for.
Does that matter?
Yes! It does. Too many people use the wrong social handles to tag a brand. Some even use wrong spellings while posting. Social listening tools for Twitter or even for other social platforms should be smart enough to pick them up.
Now that you have understood how to use Twitter for business marketing, the first thing you need to do is to invest in a reliable, advanced, user-friendly Twitter listening tool. And that’s not a big deal because almost all social listening tools work pretty well for Twitter listening.
There are a few exclusive Twitter listening tools but we do not recommend them. The price they charge is almost the same as (or maybe more) what we charge you for tracking millions of social media platforms, blogs, Q&A websites, forums, news websites, etc. You should rather buy an all-in-one tool so you can soon start monitoring other social media too.
Notifier: the best affordable Twitter listening tool
There are numerous social listening tools but not all of them are worth their price. Some of them are ridiculously expensive, making it almost impossible for small and medium-size businesses to afford them.
If you are looking for an inexpensive but functionally efficient social listening tool for Twitter, you can check out this article where we have listed the top 20 ones that we believe serve their purpose the best.
As we have mentioned in that article, Notifier is the most affordable social listening tool. Don’t misjudge it because of its low price. It is a very simple tool with no fancy features that could confuse you. And, that’s what people like about it! It is one of the few Twitter listening tools that provide almost everything that you need to maximize the ROI of your Twitter marketing strategy.
Whether you want to keep track of what your buyers are talking about you or you want to track potential business leads, or maybe you just want to improve the quality of your tweets, Notifier’s social listening capabilities can help you create and implement a result-oriented Twitter marketing strategy so you get maximum ROI for your money as well as efforts.
Watch this video to understand how Notifier works for Twitter listening. As you can see in this video, it has an extremely simple user-friendly dashboard. It comes with an almost zero learning curve, unlike other expensive social listening tools that require weeks of learning.
What are you waiting for?
To get started with social listening on Twitter, all you need to do is to enroll for Notifier’s 7-day free trial. The trial will help you understand how this most affordable social listening tool can help you gain more Twitter followers, use the right hashtags to increase the reach of your tweets, and overall get more business from social media platforms.
Also, do not hesitate to try other tools too! You don’t have to go by our words. Try them out and do a detailed comparison because you must not settle for something substandard or something that you won’t be able to afford for a long time.
Feel free to reach us for any query or feedback.