Fact: if you have a Twitter account for business, you have to, have to, have to be on top of it. If you never see or answer tweets to your business, that’s like listing a phone number you never answer. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to manage multiple Twitter accounts for businesses. TweetDeck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) is one of the most powerful tools to manage a Twitter business account, and the best part? It’s free! Once you learn how to use Tweetdeck, you won’t turn back!
In this post, we’ll explore some ways you can use this awesome tool for social listening on Twitter to manage and even grow your business through its robust social media management and custom timelines features.
Intro to TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a dashboard comprised of columns that filter tweets for easy monitoring. It looks like this:
Each of those columns is a separate stream of tweets based on criteria I set up.
The first column is notifications from my personal account.
The next column is mentions of our company account (@TheSocialQuant).
The third is set up to show any tweet mentioning the words “Social Quant.” This way we see who’s talking about us but didn’t tag us with our handle.
The fourth is set to display direct messages to our business account.
And the fifth column shows every tweet with a link shared to any page on our site via Twitter.
Now we can see anyone mentioning our business, contacting us, or sharing our content all in a glance. This is a powerful time-saver when it comes to managing your business’ Twitter account.
There are endless ways you can use TweetDeck to monitor Twitter. These are just some basics I recommend for everyone to start with.
So let’s get right to it and talk about some awesome ways to use TweetDeck for your Twitter marketing!
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Twitter Monitoring for Customer Service
More and more, people are turning to Twitter for customer service.
Complaints, questions, compliments – they all come through Twitter now. If your business has a Twitter account set up, you need to monitor it like a support email address.
If someone reaches out for support on Twitter and you don’t respond, that’s a double whammy of no-no. Not only is a customer or prospect not answered, it’s also in the public view that they reached out and weren’t responded to – bad for biz!
Brand Mentions
To set up a column for brand mentions, go to the left sidebar of Tweet deck and click on “Add column.”
Next you’ll see a pop up of all the options for columns on TweetDeck:
To start we want to set up a column for people mentioning our account. Choose the “Mention” option, select the account you want, and click “Add Column.”
Now you’ll have a stream of every tweet that contains your business’ handle.
But that’s not enough. What about people who use your business name but don’t tag you with your handle? You definitely want to be aware of those tweets too!
So next we’ll set up a column of tweets that contain your business name. For us, it would be “Social Quant.”
To set up this column, we’ll start in the search bar and type in our query (Social Quant) like so:
Hit enter or click the magnifying glass icon and the column will automatically be created.
Direct Messages
Now we’ll set up our column for Direct Messages to our business.
Click “Add column” in the left sidebar again and this time choose “Messages,” select the account, and click Add Column.
Who’s Sharing Your Content
Finally, we’ll set up a column to monitor who is sharing our content. Again, type the top level of your domain (your site address without the http:// or www.) into the search bar and hit enter or click the magnifying glass to create the column.
Boom! You’ve just set up a mission control station to monitor pretty much everything to do with your business on Twitter.
Now, let’s look beyond your own brand for ways to use Twitter monitoring for your business.
Keyword Mention Monitoring for Opportunities
One great way to prospect for new customers is to monitor industry related keywords. You’ll often find opportunities to start conversations with potential customers and make valuable connections with this technique.
Start by identifying a good keyword to monitor for your business. For example, if you own an eCommerce outdoor supply store, set up a column for everyone who’s tweeting the word camping.
I added a camping column to TweetDeck and only had to scroll back less than 20 minutes to find these five tweets I could easily respond to if I owned an online camping supply store.
But remember not to just jump right in and sell to these folks. They’re on Twitter to have fun and share what’s going on in their lives. Don’t tweet them back a commercial – they don’t want that.
That said, they almost everyone on Twitter wants to have conversations. Use these tweets to get a dialogue going and see where it leads.
Also, have a lead magnet handy for these kinds of conversations and use it to build an email list.
For the camping example, you could have a free resource about camping you can offer in exchange for an email address.
That’s a great strategy! Start a conversation, offer something of value, and get an email address – everybody wins!
Bonus Idea: Stalk Your Competition on Twitter
Another awesome strategy is to set up streams to keep an eye on your competitors.
There are a couple benefits from monitoring your competition.
One, you can attempt to poach their unhappy customers.
Again, Twitter users tweet when they’re not happy with a business. These are opportunities for you to sweep in and steal that customer away if you’re competitors are asleep at the wheel and you are active in real time.
Two, you can see what kind of content they’re producing that’s getting good engagement and create your own (hopefully better) version of that topic.
It can be a struggle to come up with content ideas. Let your competitors show you what’s resonating with your shared audience!
Wrapping Up How to Use Tweetdeck
As you can see, TweetDeck is an invaluable hub for monitoring Twitter activity. And although I only went over a few ways you can use it, the possibilities are nearly endless, including an easy way to schedule tweets.
Anything you can think to search on Twitter, you can turn into a column on TweetDeck. If you want to get super fancy, try doing some unique queries with Twitter Advanced Search and then copy what shows up in the search bar into a column on TweetDeck.
Before you know it, there won’t be an inch of Twitter important to you that you can’t monitor!
So what do you think? I’d love to hear about some creative ways you are (or will be) using TweetDeck for your Twitter marketing in the comments section below!
David Boutin
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Thanks Emmerey! Actually, TweetDeck is free forever – one of its best features :) – let me know how you like it!