Advanced Twitter Listening Tip: Track More Than Just Your Mentions

Twitter is as much – and maybe more – about listening as it is about broadcasting. If you want your business or personal Twitter account to succeed, you’ve got to have a listening strategy in place in order to access valuable feedback, learn, and engage your customers and connections.

But if your listening strategy involves checking out your “@ Connect” folder every once in a while for users mentioning your Twitter handle, you’ve got a long way to go.

Listening on Twitter involves thinking strategically, and thinking like your customers.

For instance, if you wanted to gripe about that lukewarm coffee you just got from your local mom and pop on Twitter, how would you do it?

You might do a quick Google search for their Twitter handle and mention them in your tweet…

“Disappointed with @MomAndPops coffee this morning! #notagoodwaytowakeup”

…Or you might not. Instead, many people simply type “Mom & Pop’s Shop” in their tweet like like:

“Disappointed with Mom & Pop’s Shop coffee this morning! #notagoodwaytowakeup”

And in order to move on customer complaints, comments and questions like the one above, you’ve got to cast a wider listening net than just your @username.

Spend 15 minutes brainstorming as many names as you can that people might use to “tag” your business (or yourself) in their tweets. Start with your @username and full business name of course, but get as creative as you can with the others.

For instance, do you have a popular product? A tagline? Slogan? Prominent CEO? Gather all of the identifiable keywords that people might use to reference your business on Twitter in a single document.

Next, create one or several saved searches that cover the spectrum of these keywords. I say several because some might group more effectively with others: Your five different products might make sense in one saved search, while your three Twitter handles might belong in another.

Be sure to set up a monitoring schedule for when you’ll look at these saved searches. I suggest checking in at least twice a day, morning and evening, to be sure you don’t miss a customer’s Twitter inquiry. And, it goes without saying, you must actively respond to customers mentioning you on Twitter if you want to build a community and be perceived as a business that is socially savvy.

How do you listening on Twitter? Share your strategies with us in the comments below.

(Can on a string image via Shutterstock)

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Twitter Tip: Don’t Auto-Connect Your Facebook And Twitter Accounts

Twitter has made it deceptively easy to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook account, but don’t be fooled. It’s usually not a good idea.

Twitter and Facebook are two distinct networks with two distinct sets of etiquette and norms. Posting all of your tweets to your Facebook wall may sound like a good idea at first (I can keep my friends updated oneverything going on in my life!), but believe me, neither your Facebook nor your Twitter friends will thank you.

How to do it

Before we get into the details of why it’s a bad idea to connect your Twitter to your Facebook account, here’s how to do it (for those who want to flout my advice):

As Twitter’s Help Center explains, you can post all of your tweets to your Facebook profile using an official application. You simply have to be logged in to your Twitter account and your Facebook account, and navigate to the app page: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/. Then, just click “Allow” when asked if you want to connect your two accounts, and voila! you’re all hooked up.

After setting this up, all of your tweets will be simultaneously posted to your Facebook profile, with a little note at the bottom mentioning that it came from Twitter.

Why you shouldn’t

Now that you know how, here’s why you shouldn’t auto-tweet to your Facebook profile.

Twitter and Facebook are two very different networks. The people you’re connected to on Twitter expect different things than those you’re connected to on Facebook (even if most of them are the same group of people).

Twitter is a high-volume network, where you can tweet ten or twenty times a day and no one will say boo. Because you are encouraged to follow lots of different people – those you know and those you don’t – and because you don’t require their permission to do so, Twitter is a more informal and loosely connected network.

Facebook, on the other hand, is much more personal. You friend people who have to accept your friend request, implying some level of familiarity. The volume of updates on Facebook is much, much less than on Twitter! People expect one, maybe two status updates a day, maximum.

The culture of both networks is different, so if you combine them you risk alienating your audience. By posting your tweets to your Facebook profile, you’ll inundate your Facebook friends with status update after status update, taking over their newsfeed and appearing spammy. Those 10 tweets will fit perfectly within Twitter’s real-time home timeline, but they’ll clutter up your Facebook wall and may even result in a block or an unfriending.

The syntax of both networks is also different. Twitter relies on “#”s and “@”s to function and uses abbreviations like “RT”, while Facebook’s syntax is less niche. If your fill up your Facebook wall with status updates from Twitter like “@JustinBieber you #RockMyWorld RT @YourFriend Isn’t @JustinBieber so amazing?”, your Facebook friends will quickly become annoyed.

The exceptions

Of course, there are some exceptions to every rule.

If you don’t tweet very often (say, once or twice per day at the most, and not even every day at that), connecting Twitter to Facebook might not make much difference to your Facebook followers.

Still, the better way, in my opinion, to post a tweet to your Facebook wall is just by syncing both your Twitter account and your Facebook account to a dashboard like HootSuite, and selecting both networks for those tweets you feel also belong on Facebook. This way you can choose which Twitter messages to also post to Facebook, rather than being at the whim of an auto-updater.

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HOWTO: Send Tweets To Facebook

Twitter has made it easier to send tweets to Facebook. All you have to do is click one single button. Here’s how:

First, log in to your Twitter account.

Next, click the “Profile” tab at the top of the screen, and then click “Edit Profile” just below your profile picture. Scroll down to the bottom of this page, and click the button that says “Post your Tweets to Facebook”. And that’s it!

(Note that you must also be signed in to Facebook for this to work. If you’re not, you’ll be asked to sign in and give your permission to the app before it will work)

In a smart move, Twitter will not send tweets that begin with an @mention to your Facebook wall, as these are usually meant for another, specific Twitter user and would likely be seen as spam by your Facebook friends.

Prior to this update, if you wanted to send a tweet to Facebook, you had to first find and authorize a Facebook app to access your Twitter account, and even then the functionality was spotty at best. This new functionality makes sending tweets to Facebook more of a native Twitter experience.

As a word of warning: Twitter and Facebook are two different networks with two different types of syntax and etiquette. It isn’t always advisable to connect one network to another, for fear of alienating your connections on both. You can read more about why connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts might not be a good idea in our article here.

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