Using Social Media? Improve Your Listening Skills Using Twitter Search

In an April 2010 survey, we asked our resellers about their social media engagement efforts. A respectable 39% said they were actively using social media tools like Twitter to acquire new customers and 35% were using social media to help them keep customers.

During some informal follow-up conversations with our resellers, we were told that despite their efforts, many of our resellers were waiting to see a return on this investment and that engaging in social media was akin to an eight year old thrown into a swimming pool, with an overzealous father believing that if he yelled “swim! swim!” loud enough, the child would somehow figure it out.

In worse cases, some staff dedicated to the role were complaining of burn-out out due to the sheer amount of realtime information they attempted to absorb while they separated the “wheat from the chaff”.

Like swimming, social media isn’t a one day, jump in the pool and go kind of proposition. But the good news is that Social media does have the shallow end equivalent of the swimming pool: “Listening”.

Using social media to effectively listen

One of the simplest ways to avoid social media burnout is to map out what you want to listen for and then build that into the tools your team is using. For example, a major segment of our wholesale reseller base are webhosts and ISPs (Internet Service Providers).

For webhosts and ISPs, identifying important search keywords like “cloud computing”, “control panel software”, “webhosting company”, “highspeed <citynamehere>” would all be relevant criteria since they would turn up conversations with people talking about these things.

Effective searching = effective listening. It’s not a set-it-and-forget it proposition, but by careful searching, it becomes far easier to find the conversations you’re looking for in order to engage more effectively.

The video below offers a beginning user a quick walkthrough that demonstrates how I use Twitter search, followed by adding these searches to Tweetdeck and Google Reader RSS. It’s saved me a lot of time over the years and I hope it will help you too.

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http://ourkids.net/blog Travis Allison

Thanks for this, Ben!

Do you have any suggestions for my “search problem”? Our organization has been around since just before internet search and we have a brutal time filtering out unrelated content – our name was chosen before you had to consider things like listening to the online conversation. If you search for the phrase “our kids” you get overwhelmed with results.

Thanks for your help,

Travis

Ben Lucier

Hey Travis, thanks for checking in.

As you’ve noticed, it can be difficult searching by only your brand name, especially in cases where your brand matches unrelated content. We have a similar challenge at Tucows since we operate a large download mirror and often get mentioned in related to downloads. If we’re looking for conversations related to our brand, we’re often filtering out the keywords “download” and “rating” (because we see “5 cow ratings” or “download from Tucows”).

Also, you don’t have to only search your brand. You could search other things. For example, if you wanted to search for conversations around reading and kids, you could start using keywords like “kids” and “books” or “reading” and then narrow down your results by using the ‘-’ option.

Does that make sense?

http://www.higheredcareercoach.com Sean Cook

Ben,

I really enjoyed the video and learned a lot from it. Simple, accessible and easy to act on. I plan to share with my network.

Sean

Ben Lucier

Sean, thanks for stopping by. I’m glad you appreciated it. Always looking for suggestions on what to do next!

Using Social Media? Improve Your Listening Skills Using Twitter Search

Using social media to effectively listen

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