Category Archives: Twitter

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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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!