Using Social Media? Improve Your Listening Skills Using Twitter Search

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 08:01 AM PDT

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.

OPENSRS

sábado, 3 de julio de 2010