Sure, over the last decade, social media has evolved for business around the globe, and so it has evolved in the same vein for your brand as well. From having a strategic role to play in your company’s overall marketing plan to having a plethora of resources being allotted to make it grow, Twitter today makes one of the most important avenues of marketing for your business. 

Yet somehow, there are so many things that even savvy businesses lose out on, when it comes to making the most from the fastest growing social media channel that is focused on conversations! 

Enter social listening on Twitter, the art and science of keeping a tab on conversations around topics, keywords, and themes that are of relevance or importance for your business, in order to utilize the maximum benefit your brand could gain out of being active on Twitter. 

On any given day, there are about more than 200 million odd tweets that are being made, according to the official data shared by the company. And this number is only going to grow much, much further. 

What that translates for you as a marketer or a business owner is to make the most of this opportunity, and work towards acing your Twitter (read: social media) game. 

In this guide, we will take you through everything that you need to know about Twitter listening so that you don’t lose another chance to have a conversation that converts. So, without any further ado, let us dive right into it as deep as we can. 

Already know what Twitter listening is? Try Radarr to get started. 

But wait, what exactly is Twitter Listening?

Now, apart from the basic definition we just gave in the introduction, there is a lot you need to know about Twitter Listening, solely in terms of what it is. According to Wikipedia, this is what social media listening is: 

Social media listening or social listening is a way of computing the popularity of a brand or company by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content from time to time. In other words, this is the way to calibrate the success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or a brand. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand.

If you want to learn more about social listening, read this article complete guide to social listening 

Twitter listening is exactly this, but obviously limited to Twitter. You spend some time scrounging through the plethora of conversations around the topics or hashtags relevant to your business in a frequent manner to glean insights that can supercharge how you go about the rest of your social media and marketing strategy. 

And voila, you now have an edge over your competition!

Umm, but why is social listening on Twitter even important? 

When it comes to social listening, Twitter might be one of the most primed platforms to have ever existed in this world. Why you ask? Its users are active, socially aware, and available, and do not ever shy away from speaking their minds, especially when it requires confronting a brand, big or small, its executives, subsidiaries, and whatnot. 

But, in the thick and thin of it, here are some of the reasons social listening on Twitter is important, as compared to other platforms or other ways of gleaning marketing insights:

• Twitter is a rapidly growing platform, making it ripe for more and more insights going forward

• All of your peers and competitors are there, and people are talking about both of you in the same vein

• There are trends and fashions that have erupted from Twitter, and will continue to in the future as well

• Bad press snowballs into bigger ones in a matter of hours, if not earlier, so you need to know there’s a fire under you before your back starts to feel warm

Some of these reasons, and a whole lot more that might be relevant to just your brand and vertical more than make up for you having to invest in a social listening strategy for Twitter.

Implementing a social listening strategy for Twitter

Now that we have discussed a bit about social listening for Twitter, and how it is imperial for your brand, it’s time to deep dive into an implementation strategy for the same. One that is actionable, can be followed without emptying your pockets, and is sure to show you the results you’ve been hoping for. 

So, without further ado, let’s look at all the steps right here: 

Step 1: Identify the goals of your Twitter social listening strategy

Just like any other marketing or social media activity, having a clear set of goals that act as a guiding star for your actions makes it all the more worthwhile and rewarding to pursue an activity. Which is why, for your social listening strategy for Twitter, the very first thing you should be doing is to identify the goals that you are going to want to achieve over a period of time. 

One of the ways you can go about it is to have a look at your branding, marketing, sales and customer service processes, identifying loopholes and gaps, and take note of what would help you address those better. 

Followed by listing down the goals you want to achieve with social listening that align with the progress you made in the step previous to this. Having clear KPIs on social listening will help you analyse whether or not the effort is paying off. 

Some of the other objectives you can achieve through Twitter listening (although you will have to tweak them basis the nature of your business vertical) are as follows: providing better customer service, generating new leads, gaining a headstart over your competitors, identifying up and coming influencers in your industry, driving innovation as a central tenet of your brand, and improving your promotion strategy.

Step 2: Choose a social listening tool for your strategy

You know Twitter literally has millions of conversations going on at any given point of day, so, the tool which can help you get a bird’s eye view to glean insights from the platform needs to be one which puts the T in robust. Otherwise, you might only be setting yourself up for a big failure, whether you are able to identify it well in time or not will decide if you are able to recuperate from it.

Given the plethora of tools out there today, you need to pick one that is able to read the millions of conversations going on, on Twitter, and helps you collate all the data in one place along with helping you derive actionable insights from it. 

At the cost of sounding slightly salesy, Radarr is one such tool which empowers you to achieve that, uprooting any of your existing marketing tech systems, and any other contingencies you could think of. 

Want to see how Radarr can help you with Twitter listening? Book a demo today. 

Step 3: Set up your social listening tool up to speed

Once you have gone ahead and chosen a tool which aligns with your needs, you would then have to calibrate it according to the goals and KPIs you’re looking to move for your brand by doing social listening. You also need to clearly mention what it is that you really want to track for the right kind of data to be captured. 

You can read more about setting up social listening on Twitter.

And if you’d rather have a social growth consultant help you out, you can reach out to the team at Radarr here.  

But doing just this much sometimes might not be enough. Imagine having access to millions of data points on ongoing conversations and your audience, and still not being able to put it to work.  

So, in the next section of this article, we are going to focus on how you can use the insights you glean from your Twitter listening strategy and make the most of your time and money. 

How to use insights from your Twitter Listening strategy

Great, so now you have a bunch of different streams of thoughts coming in from listening in to what your customers, audience and the world at large has to say about your business. The insights that you are now loaded with can help you with the following directions: 

Product improvement

Hopefully, when you set your Twitter Listening tool up, you were able to identify and lay some focus on parameters that are relevant to your product. As an example, your product-related searches should likely result in customer feedback, feature request, and some brand sentiment on top of it.

Going forward, you can use this data to understand how to improve your product and identify new use cases for it. 

Industry monitoring

It’s likely that you’re already following the top influential brands in your industry or that you’re one of those brands. But discussions move fast on Twitter and monitoring what other industry voices are talking about will help inform your content strategy in a massive, massive way. 

For instance, Tweets around a local or international conference are an easy way of tracking what’s an emerging trend and mostly come along with an associated hashtag to ease things up for you.

Informed content strategy & campaigns

There are many different ways to use social listening on Twitter to inform your content strategy and achieve massive results. The very first one is to use your Twitter analytics reports to see what type of content is resonating with your audience the best. 

Step two is looking at what your competitors are putting out and what’s resonating with their audience. Is it worth it to imitate whatever is working for them? Where and why are they failing so you can fill that need? Are you dominating the conversation topic in your industry more than your competitor? All these questions and more help you get where you need to be.

And finally, social listening reports can drive your next campaign. What are customers talking about the most online? Identify their needs and create a campaign around them. You can use the listening results from one campaign to inform your next one, ensuring you precisely meet your customers’ needs every single time of the day.

Identify new partnerships

A byproduct of the social listening you put into place is that listening will surface new marketing opportunities. You are most likely to find new influencers for your product and co-marketing partners for your next campaign, and so on.

In addition to identifying the influencers, listening will also help you focus on hot topics in those spaces. Is there a trend of coffee bars in boutique hotels? As a travel company, you can ask your influencers to push that discussion point more. Or you know, whatever is the most relevant and aligned with your nature of business and vertical. 

Understand the sentiment of your audience 

This one is our favorite – the real growth hack to nailing it on Twitter! 

With social listening on Twitter, you will not just be able to keep track of ongoing conversations and trends, but the “emotion” or “sentiment” that led to them. This includes the sentiment of the audience when they start out a conversation relevant to your business, industry or maybe even a competitor. 

This gives you a clear direction in terms of what you can double down on – things that lead to a positive sentiment, and things you need to avoid to keep the negative responses at bay. 

See how social listening on Twitter can benefit your business? Book a demo today. 

Three must-haves to jumpstart your Twitter Listening

Thanks to Twitter’s official blog, they were able to give us a deep-dive into how a brand goes about listening in to conversations around topics relevant to it. And in this section we will just about summarize the key takeaways from the same. 

Here is what the day to day of social listening looks like, in the following three ways.

• Using tools to drive results home: the brand uses a comprehensive social listening tool that allows their team to execute real-time brand monitoring and listening to analyze social data for marketing analytics.
  
  Fortunately for you, the same can be achieved through Radarr’s state of the art social listening platform.

• Keywords: Now, first of all, keywords are going to play by far the most important role in your Twitter Listening strategy. Finding out relevant keywords and keyword phrases people use when searching for your brand. This also includes searches for your product or services.

• Engage: Lastly, you have to plan to intelligently respond to the conversations you uncover online. You will likely uncover all kinds of conversations around your brand or keywords. Complaints, compliments, recommendations, reviews . . . you get the drift. Make sure you have an engagement strategy to address each one of those, and do it well.

Hearing what matters: Parting words on Twitter Listening

Now, before you rush to take your Twitter listening game to the next level, there are some things you should know. 

The suggestions and tips outlined in this article are just the starting point for you, as a business, and as a marketer, the onus is on you to modify your strategy basis the results you want to achieve, the resources you have at your disposal, and other things. 

So, make sure you do justice to this nascent art and science, and glean insights that give you the competitive edge you so very much deserve!

Here is the 21 Twitter Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2022

Also, if you want to learn more about social listening on other platforms, follow our blog here.