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How to build your own customized Twitter brand monitoring tool….for absolutely nothing!
As I’ve said previously, Twitter can be so much more to businesses than yet another broadcast platform.
Sadly, I see so many brands focused on driving clicks and downloads to their own content that they often forget that they could be learning something instead.
In my opinion, if you want your brand to start making the most of Twitter, it’s time you started listening.
Get set up
The easiest way to begin is with a tool like TweetDeck, which allows you to monitor Twitter activity without having to log in. It works by adding columns that display certain types of information. You can choose any data you find relevant to form the basis of a listening dashboard.
To start using TweetDeck simply sync it with your Twitter profile and you’re good to go.
Add the basics
The first thing to do is to add the fundamental streams that monitor for interactions with your account. I’d recommend @mentions, messages and followers.
You can now see in one place when anyone mentions, messages or follows you. This gives you a great foundation for listening.
Find relevant tweets
Next you’ll want to find some tweets relevant to your business. The best thing to do is to set up a search stream.
Enter a search term relevant to your business to see a live feed of all tweets containing that term. You can make this feature even more powerful using the OR function to search for multiple terms in a single stream.
Filter out the bad
After you’ve set up some search streams, there’s a good chance you’ll have a rather imposing feed of information, not all of it useful. I like to cut to the good stuff using some filters.
In your stream options you can choose to exclude certain terms (if one of your terms is ambiguous) and even set a minimum number of required interactions for it to qualify.
This should ensure that only valuable and relevant tweets populate your dashboard.
Set up alerts
Having a steady flow of quality information is fantastic but it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to watch it all the time. I set up alerts on some of my more important streams so I receive a sound or pop-up notification if something happens. You can do this in the options for each individual stream.
And there you have it; a quality controlled, automated Twitter brand monitoring tool customized for your account and industry terms. And it will send you a message whenever something important happens. Pretty neat!
