Monitoring Your Brand on Twitter

Twitter is a very popular social media channel to be heard nowadays. It is here to stay and it is a very powerful tool for communicating information to an infinite audience. You can also get information across in real time. You don’t need to wait for Google bots to crawl and index your web page. No matter what, your message will be dispersed and hopefully “retweeted” right away. It’s an excellent tool for spreading the word. However, that is a double-edged sword when you run a business because people can say positive things about your business and they can also say negative things.

Of course, you should definitely get involved with Twitter for your business. You should definitely use it to monitor the discussion surrounding your brand. That discussion may be occurring —whether or not you are aware of it. With such a volume of information being spread through Twitter, how do you swift through the noise and find out what is being said about your business? Fortunately, there are several tools available to monitor your topics. You should definitely become very well acquainted with these tools and you should consider them an important part of your online reputation awareness campaign.

Why is monitoring your brand on Twitter so important? It’s an essential part of reputation management. As much as possible, you want to have control of what is being said. It certainly does not mean that people shouldn’t have opinions, it is just that you should have the opportunity to help turn the conversation from negative to positive, if necessary. If something negative is said about your company, you want to be able to address what is said. Maybe it’s something that can be cleared up, such as a customer service problem. If it’s something minor, it might benefit your image to clear it up on the public forum where the negative comment was aired. If it’s something more serious, you can at least contact the person offline and address the problem and hopefully fix the relationship.

Of course, you can’t have eyes and ears everywhere. Fortunately there is software to help you find the talk that matters most to you. The best part is that most of it is free to use. There are many software options to help you cut through all of the chatter on Twitter. To monitor all of the talk, here are a few questions that can help.

• Does a social media presence equal more sales?
• What’s in a (domain) name?
• Can touching people be good for business?
• Can niche blogs help you win more customers?

The easiest way to find buzz about your company is to do a search with Twitter’s built in search bar. Run a search for your business name and any other monikers attached to your business. You also want to run a search for any keywords related to your industry. This will give you an idea of what is possibly being said about your company but also what is being said about your industry in general. TweetDeck is another popular tool for monitoring keywords and phrases. Within TweetDeck, you can add a few search panes that include keywords and hashtags, which relate to your business or brand.

Hootsuite is another way to set up monitoring. Similar to TweetDeck, Hootsuite will help you to monitor your brand by allowing you to set up tabs for the different items you want to monitor. However, unlike TweetDeck you don’t have to download any software. That fact alone makes Hootsuite convenient. Because you don’t have to download any software, you can use it on any computer simply by logging in.

On a positive note, these tools can also be used to help build your audience. Track keywords related to your industry and “follow” the people discussing the topic. Chances are they have an interest in the topic and possibly your business. Likewise, you can monitor questions people might have in your industry and answer them. You will position yourself up as an expert and hopefully gain a potential client.

Interested in knowing what is being said about your brand without having to “be everywhere?” Let us handle your brand monitoring on Twitter. We can set up accounts with popular keyword monitoring sites and track the results. We’ll present the results to you on a regular basis and suggest ways you can improve the buzz surrounding your business. We can also help build your Twitter following by following people who show an interest in your brand based on your tweets. If there isn’t yet talk about your business we can get that going too.

Conclusion

Twitter is an extremely important social media tool for your business. Of course, it is critical tha you pay close attention to how your brand is doing and to what people are saying and Twitter is an excellent way to do that.

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