Category Archives: Social Media

How to Use Twitter to Listen to your Local Customers

March 12, 2012 – 8:15 am

As a local business professional, it’s impossible to follow everything online. With Facebook converting their Pages to Timelines and Google introducing Plus Pages for Business, there are more opportunities for us to listen to our customers’ concerns than ever before. Listening is the first step to engagement on social media, but before you can listen, you need to identify what areas you want to focus your energy on.

This post will highlight two things; brainstorming keywords and applying those keywords to find new business using the Twitter Advanced Search. So here we go…

Brainstorming Keywords

Before you go wandering off into the wild, it is best to lay out a solid foundation of keyword phrases that you think, and based on some data, people in your area would be looking for your help. Let’s take “photographers” as an example. If I was a photographer, specifically a wedding photographer, then my initial keyword list might looking something like this:

Photography
Photographer
Photographers
Wedding photography
Wedding photographer
Wedding photographers
Wedding photos
Wedding portraits
Ottawa Photographer
Ottawa Wedding Photographer

If you search any of these phrases on Twitter, you will find a wack load of results. So in order to filter this down and be more specific about what we want, we may look at creating a secondary list of keywords with some search intent behind it. I like to call these words “action words” because you are asking people to provide you with information, so that there is something I could take action on once I get an answer:

Suggestion
Suggest
Recommendation
Recommend
Help
photographer? (with a question mark)

Now you can see that those phrases above spell out the intent of the searcher. Now we know they are looking for suggestions from their friends/followers, and that they need help looking for someone to do their wedding photographs. Wow… so how might you apply these keywords to your listening on Twitter? Here’s how…

Save Twitter Search:

I found a great example here where someone simply asked on Twitter…

Anyone knows or can suggest a great photographer in Ottawa? The hubby & I want to have our 1st photoshoot possibly late spring/early summer

— Clara? (@Mss_Clara) March 10, 2012

I’m not going after this business… but maybe you should

How did I find this?

If you haven’t visited Twitter’s Advanced Search page, then I recommend you do so. Here is what your search query might look like:

photographer? near:”ottawa” within:25km

Where I’ve entered in “photographer?” in the keyword field and “ottawa” in the location field. This search will return only those tweets that happened around the Ottawa area where someone had a question about a photographer. You can adjust the radius of your location up to 1,000 km or miles… but I think that would be stretching it if you are covering that much space. Save and check out your saved search from time to time to see what shows up in your feed.

Are you using saved searches on Twitter? How are you doing so?

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RockMelt Rocks the iPhone

April 24, 2011 – 3:45 pm

If you're a Facebook addict, then you must have heard, or maybe even used, the RockMelt browser that launched last November. I have RockMelt installed on both my PC and Mac, and now I their mobile app is on my iPhone (addict or what). If you're like me, then you probably tend not to stick with one browser, rather multiple; Chrome, FireFox, RockMelt, and Safari (and no, I do not use Internet Explorer…). I've been using FireFox a lot lately because of their new launch of FF 4, which I think has some cool features to it. There's a lot happening in the 'browser industry' and I think it's harder on the users because we don't know which browser we should choose to go with.

But, let's get right into it. After fiddling around with the RockMelt app on my iPhone (free from the iTunes store), I found the user experience to be good.

Here's what the homepage interface and settings menu looks like on the iPhone:

Here are some of the things that I like from a iPhone user/reader perspective:

Cross-synchronization between your desktop computer (Mac or PC) with the RockMelt iPhone app: If you have RockMelt installed on your computer, any activity/asset you have on the browser (bookmarks, favourites), carries over to your other devices that have RockMelt on there as well. The team did a fantastic job with this feature. For example, if you do a search in their search/URL bar, the browser presents results from Google. You can then easily bookmark the link to your browser, which instantly adds that bookmark to your browser on your PC/Mac (yes, I tested it and it showed up instantly!).

View Later: You're half-way through an exciting, but long article, when all of a sudden you notice that you're going to be late for your client meeting… so what do you do? You close your window, lock your phone, and start rushing to your meeting. In many cases, you forget things because our days are full of activities that require us to remind this and that. RockMelt's View Later feature is a neat, but intuitive one that allows you add an article to a list that you can return to afterwards, to finish up what you were reading. As far as I can tell, you can have as many articles in that list, but it might be counter productive to build a view later list that comprises of over 1000 articles, wouldn't you say?

Names in Twitter feed: Unlike the Twitter app on the iPhone, RockMelt displays the account's actual name in the feed. I found this to be a nice component to reading somebody's update, to be reading 'John said' instead of '@johnsyourboss said' blah blah blah…

News feed opens up original article: Unlike the Pulse reader where it renders an article on their own display, RockMelt loads the ariticle on the original site. This may convince webmasters to think about having a mobile friendly design as we move over to portable devices to read our favourite blogs.

Things missing?

It's great to see that RockMelt's come out with a product that has an option to add and manage RSS feeds on their application. Does this mean trouble for Pulse?

I found that the RockMelt app doesn't have a feature that allows you to add custom feeds right from your iPhone. There is predetermined list of feeds to choose from when you click on their Add Feeds button, but that is all. Did I miss this somewhere? I'm sure I went through and click on every single button but couldn't get to that 'add custom feed' into the RockMelt app…

I can however, add the add manually from my RockMelt browser on my Mac and it syncs instantly to my list of feeds on the RockMelt app. Hm…

Here's a quick video that explains what the features are for RockMelt for iPhone:

Thoughts about RockMelt on the iPhone?

What are your thought about the RockMelt application on the iPhone? What improvements can they make moving forward to make the browsing and reading experience better? Please share your comments below.

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The Social Buzz: Mac & Cheese TV

April 5, 2011 – 3:33 am

Last week, Kraft came out with a unique social media marketing approach to get a TV commercial together for their famous Mac & Cheese product. What was it? Tweet "Mac & Cheese" or "Mac n Cheese" and win a spot for your tweet on national television. Woohoo!

I came across this contest while waiting at a bus stop on my way to work. I quickly sent my tweet out: "Mac & Cheese, you just made my day!" and a minute later, @kraftmacncheese replied with a question asking for my permission to turn it into a National TV ad, of course I said yes! But unlike most tales that end in a happy ending, I later found out that my tweet didn't not make it onto National television. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Later, I got interested in finding out what the noise actually was in the Twitterverse. Here are some interesting numbers I'd like to share (my first attempt to an infographic):

There were over 70,000 conversations on Twitter for "Mac & Cheese" and "Mac n Cheese".
The peak was at 5:00PM on March 28th when conversations reached as high as 780 tweets.
@kraftmacncheese account was mentioned over 450 times between March 27-29.
"cheese" was mentioned 10,512 times.

Here is what the trended looked like:

Here is the trend for the month of March:

The highest peak was on March 8th, when the number of tweets reached 16,900. That is equivalent to 704 tweets per hour or 12 tweets per minute! Woozers!

Here's one of these TV ads, enjoy!