(Big thanks to Allie for letting me use her awesome photo!)
I read a very interesting differentiation recently on Traditional Marketing versus Social Media Marketing by Chris Borgan. In his post, Chris makes an interesting separation describing social media as the tools and marketing as the discipline. Chris goes further to state (with a pretty solid argument) that social media is more about listening, about getting to know the people on the other side- the people that aren’t you. I like that.
Keeping what Chris said in mind, I want to help make more sense (and use) out of Twitter and the recent development of Hashtags for companies (or journalists, etc) that may be looking to embrace the mindset of getting to know us (the people on the other side) better. I think that explaining a process and getting you involved is one of the better ways to increase the understanding.
Step 1: Searching Twitter Updates
There are two services that allow you to search through Twitter updates, each with its pro’s and con’s. I personally use Terraminds, but I outline both below if you want to experiment.
- Terraminds -Terraminds is a smooth experience and feels much more ironed out. Its index of Twitter updates (tweets) seems to be about every 30 minutes to hour or so. While Terraminds doesn’t index Twitter’s updates as fast as TwitterSearch, it makes up for it in the interface and by the fact that you can create an RSS feed of your search term. Because of this, I use Terraminds over TwitterSearch.
- TwitterSearch - TwitterSearch is a bit clunky and feels hacked together. It does its job, though. TwitterSearch will return public updates (tweets) as recent as 15 seconds (possibly even more recent).
You use one of these services in the same way you would use Google with keywords that bring up pertinent information on your company or product (Likewise, there will be some refining of keywords). In this case, however, we are looking for broad terms and narrow terms that pertain to your company. We do this because we are trying to find user created topics that may involve your product (these topics are called Hashtags).
We want to be broad because it increases our chance of finding a topic that may relate to your product without being about your product directly. For example: If you were in the cafe business, we would look for something like “#coffee” or “#starbucks”. #Coffee is broad and #starbucks narrow, but we want to track both as both would be important for us to track (being a cafe biz).
Once you have found search terms that give satisfactory results, I would encourage you to subscribe to those terms with your RSS reader (I use Google Reader) so you will be notified of any new results.
Step 2: Identifying Trackable Topics From Our Twitter Results
As I mentioned above, a user created topic on twitter is called a hashtag. You can spot these topics pretty easily as they are denoted with a hash symbol ‘#’ before the word (spaces in hashtags are replaced with a ‘+’). These topics are primarily what we are looking for in our Terraminds Twitter results. The other thing we should be keeping in the back of our minds are terms that are used consistently (not interchangeably) in Tweets that aren’t hashtags yet but have the potential to become hashtags (since they can be seeded hashtags as to start tracking early). We should be creating a list of these terms and topics as we find them for use in our next step.
Step 3: The People Behind The Hash[tags]
This step is pretty simple. Once we have our list of tags, we head over to Hashtags.org. There are 2 things that we can analyze here. The first is the information pertaining to the hashtag (topic), the second is the information pertaining to the people who have tweeted about a topic.
The Topic
- The number of Tweets that have been recorded on a given topic, in this case, there are 15 Tweets with #music.
- This is when the last Tweet on a topic was recorded, in this case, 5 hours ago someone Tweeted about #music.
- This is the topic (hashtag) itself, as we can see, it is denoted by a ‘#’
The People
- The number of Tweets the user has posted that uses this hashtag, in this case, 2 tweets using #music.
- The day the Tweet was posted, Dec 21.
- The user who wrote the Tweet.
- What the user’s Tweet was.
After gathering the information on the topics we wrote down and the users on those topics, you can begin the process of understanding the people who are actively using your product or service. Don’t forget to subscribe to the hashtag’s RSS feed (and mine if you haven’t ;) ).
Briefly thinking past what I described above, hashtags are also a step in quantifying what is being said and who is saying it on Twitter. You can see who has really been talking about your product and down the road potentially engage them. For example, an enhancement of how Hugh MacLeod has been using twitter for micromarketing.
Update: TweetScan is another Twitter Search engine that allows you to search through all the conversations. From what I’ve seen, I like it better than the ones I’ve described above.