On my feed this morning, up popped a post that caught my attention, How to setup a Twitter listening post. Once I clicked through to the post, though, I was disappointed because there was actually no details on setting up an actual listener. Instead, I was simply met with a post on how to setup a Twitter account.
Setting up a Twitter account doesn’t provide you any insight into what folks are actually saying about you, your brand, products or company. It only provides a means for folks to communicate with you through this unique medium.
How to Set Up Micro-Blog Listeners
To actually set up a ‘listener’, you can simply go to Google and search for the term you’re looking for (this twitter example shows a search for “microsoft ad” to twitter):
site:twitter.com "microsoft ad"
For Friendfeed:
site:friendfeed.com "microsoft ad"
If you’d like to take a step further and actually react to folks communicating about you, your product, or your brand, set up a Google Alert to email you as it happens. As a marketing or reputation manager, I might even set up a text alert with Google Alerts and I would respond directly to the tweet.
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Well durh! You’d think that would have been obvious to most people. Sounds like they don’t “really” understand twitter do they?
You’re right, Jason. When I saw the note on the other site about setting up a ‘twitter listener’ but there was no means to actually ‘listen’, I had to write the post!
I always wondered how companies I mention on Twitter are able to find me and respond. Now I know. Thanks.
Hi, Douglas .. thanks for the link!
The bulk of Beth’s advice on listening is actually contained in the slideshow. In the first part of the post, she does walk you through how to set up an account, but in the slideshow she goes into the details of how to listen for brands, trends and other details you may be interested in from a market research point of view.
She certainly mixes listening with communicating, but there are some good “how to listen” tips in the slideshow.
Cheers .. Kate
Kate,
Thanks so much for letting me know this! I owe you both an apology, I thought I was short-changed. 🙂 Looks like I need to return and listen!
Thanks Again!
Doug
🙂 No worries! I was surprised too when I first read it – but then dug into the powerpoint. SOme good stuff. Beth is a super-smart socmed evangelist!!
Hi Douglas:
An even easier way is to use TweetBeep.com which itself uses the former Summize at http://search.twitter.com. I use TweetBeep to monitor a lot of different keywords including all the various misspellings of my last name! 🙂
Also for those interested I prepared slide for an Intro to Twitter that I delivered at Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs’ recent Twitter meetup.
-Mike
Mike, that’s a great find! Too bad that Tweetbeep didn’t have some sort of instantaneous feature for capturing those search terms. If an hour goes by that someone’s speaking about your company – it could be too late!
I added it to the daily links yesterday, though! Thanks for the catch!
Hi there Douglas.
I prefer to subscribe to the Twitter search results newsfeed (top right-hand corner) like so:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22blog+bloke%22
That way I’m not waiting around for an email from Google alerts. I can access the info any time that I chose.
Your timing is impeccable, Bloke! That was my post today!
Always a bridesmaid .. never a bride 😉