Twitter for Dummies (25 page)

Keeping in Contact with Visualization and Listening Tools

Sure, building connections and influence on Twitter is a great objective, but there is even more value in the Twitter experience when you take the opportunity to tune into what people are saying about you, your company, and your favorite topics. Also, a finely attuned listening program will greatly enhance your ability to build connections and influence on Twitter in the first place.

You can find plenty of tools available that let you track your social media presence. These tools allow you to set it and forget it — you can still find out what’s said without actively trawling through Twitter. Many of these tools are free, though you can pay for some tools that come with additional business features like analytics and better organization of search results.

In the following sections, we really only skim the surface of what’s possible. But no matter which service you use, make listening a priority for yourself on Twitter. Keeping an ear to the tremendous firehose of information about consumer sentiment and even world events helps and can definitely bear fruit and make effective use of your social media engagement time invested.

Google Alerts

Setting up some basic Google Alerts, while not a Twitter-specific listening tool, is something every individual and company should do as a minimum social media listening program. The Google Alerts tool trawls the Web, looking for new blog posts, Twitter tweets, and news stories that mention whatever keywords you want to follow, then delivers those posts, tweets, and stories to your Gmail inbox (as shown in Figure 9-18).

To set up a Google Alert:

1. Log into your Gmail account.

2. In the top toolbar, click More.

A drop-down menu appears.

3. Select Even More from the menu.

The More Google Products screen appears.

4. Click the Alerts link, which has a bell to its left.

The Google Alerts screen appears.

5. In the Search Terms field, enter the topic, keyword, name, business name, or phrase that you want to monitor.

Doing a Boolean search, such as putting quotes around two words to keep them together, can help you fine-tune your Google Alert results.

6. From the Type drop-down list, select what kind of search you want to do.

We recommend Comprehensive at first, to cover all your possible search bases. If you find it is simply returning too many results for your brand, name, or keywords, you can always scale it back later.

7. From the How Often drop-down list, select how often you want Google to trawl for results.

8. In the Deliver To field, enter your Gmail address.

Google delivers the Alerts to this address.

9. Click the Create Alert button to activate the Google Alert.

10. Repeat Steps 5 through 9 for additional Alerts.

You can create as many Alert searches as you need.

BLVDStatus

BLVDStatus (
www.blvd.status.com
) is a new tool that works to help you track who is talking about you on the Internet (see Figure 9-19). It helps you pay attention to people who are using your name, your company name, a brand name, or any keywords you choose. This kind of monitoring and listening tool is a valuable way to keep track of how you, your company, or your product is perceived.

What does BLVDStatus have to do with Twitter? It’s one of the few listening tools out there that lets you incorporate tweets as well as conversations about you found other places on the Web, such as blogs, into something called
conversion tracking.
Conversion tracking means BLVDStatus will help you see which tweets about you led to visits to your site and then go deeper to filling out a contact form or ordering a product. It helps you see real results from your online involvement, and it takes you to a level a bit deeper than a simple Google Alert.

BLVDStatus displays these results in an attractive and easy-to-read set of
widgets
(colorful squares full of information you ask for, sorted how you wish to see it). The most interesting things about BLVDStatus is that it offers a free version that is valuable, offers real results you can customize, and is comparable to a larger, paid tracking company.

Twitter Search

Twitter’s own Twitter Search (
http://search.twitter.com
) allows you to figure out how people are interacting with you and what they’re saying about you on Twitter. You can track all mentions of your name, whether or not those mentions have an @ in front of them, by setting up a search and then bookmarking that search for later. If you leave the search tab open, its results automatically refresh every few moments. We have several bookmarked searches set up for our names, company names, and for any topics we are currently working on. You can also subscribe to the results of any search using RSS (see Chapters 4 and 8).

To set this kind of inclusive Twitter search:

1. Go to Twitter Search (
http://search.twitter.com
).

2. In the search box, enter your search terms.

If you want to get fancy and you know how to use search strings, you can search terms like this:

-from:dummies dummies OR dummys
,
replacing “dummies” with the term for which you want to search.

3. Click the Search button.

Your search results appear. Figure 9-20 shows the results for the example Dummies search string.

4. Bookmark the search using your favorite bookmarking feature, program or Web site.

5. Repeat Steps 2 through 4 for as many search terms as you want to track.

Radian6

We recommend Radian6 (
www.radian6.com
), a paid monitoring service, for a large corporation that needs to track multiple campaigns on a national or international scale, or for a company that doesn’t have the manpower to set up and track multiple free searches on a variety of tools. Figure 9-21 shows the Radian6 Web site.

Radian6 offers some functionality that free search monitoring services don’t, such as tracking, graphs, analysis, and the ability to assign specific tweets to team members for followup. Radian6 offers the results in an easy-to-interpret, aesthetically pleasing, real-time package. It also offers superb real-time customer service, if you need assistance.

Knowing Your Network with Follower and Following Tools

While your Twitter universe grows and grows, you probably want to find the best way possible to keep up with your followers and who you’re following. Twitter itself falls short in this area. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t offer a way to search your follower or following lists (which you can see in Figure 9-22). It also doesn’t offer a way to sort your followers alphabetically or navigate in any way more efficient than the slow page-by-page scan.

You can quickly find out whether someone is following you back by trying to send that user a direct message. If you’re on the Twitter Web interface’s DM update screen, that twitterer’s username appears in the drop-down list only if he follows you back. If you’re on a desktop client, you can try to direct message that user — if he doesn’t follow you, you get a message telling you so.