Tap Into The Twitterverse
Social Media Marketing

Tap Into The Twitterverse

28th June 2016

What are people saying about your brand on Twitter?Twitter can be such a powerful tool and community. When I started my career in digital marketing Twitter created my first connections within the industry and after a while, landed me my first agency employment. I’m a daily Twitter user in love with the community. You can find most things on Twitter, from friends to your personal heros. As a digital marketer I find Twitter amazing because of one little tiny feature – the search functionality.

I guess that I don’t have to add any information about Twitter here. If this is the first time you’ve heard of it – welcome to the Internet, we’re glad to have you here.

What are people saying about your brand?

Brands must love Twitter search. You can with a simple search find out what people are saying about the brand, in real-time. But it can be a bit clunky and needs some tweaking. We don’t speak all languages so let me introduce you to the simple language filter: lang:en

Adding the language filter to a search makes all the difference. What are people saying about Mumford and Sons in Sweden? Just “mumford and sons” lang:sv and tap into peoples opinions.

Holy cow, we’re segmenting tweetings! How fun is that? But hold on, we’re not close to done yet. Everybody and their mum loves Mumford and sons. This will cause our Twitter searches to pick up many retweets, which we want to filter out with a simple -rt command. No retweets! Awesome.

Monitoring brand mentions should be the brand and the domain name (or names). For instance, I blog in Swedish at perpettersson.nu and in English at perpettersson.me. Using a simple OR command, I can set up a search if someone mentions me or any of my domains. Just as simple like this: “per pettersson” OR perpettersson.nu OR perpettersson.me

Captain Obvious: You’re setting this up for your competitors right now, aren’t you? You should. There is nothing wrong with listening in on public conversations. You can even turn it up to stalker alert level 49 by using a FROM and TO command like this: from:per_p to:juliencoquet

So now you’re stalking me and Julien Coquet on Twitter. Expect smartness – or just pictures of food. I would put my money on food 99% of the times.

Positive and negative mentions of your brand

Its all about how we perform our searches on Twitter that will set the limitations. “mumford and sons”:( will return our search with a sad emoticon. Sentiment search! Everybody high fives.

Twitter search for Mumford and Sons

We are all sad, Grass Cirby. We are all sad.

Captain Obvious: you could perform the opposite search – “mumford and sons” 🙂 for a positive Twitter search.

Its all about location

You are in charge of the PR for Mumford and Sons in Stockholm. Why not narrow your search with the help of location data (optional for users to activate) by a simple near:”Stockholm, Sweden” command.

Twitter search with location

Holy mole, that is a nifty little search filter we’ve not used before – right? Don’t be shy.

Let’s pause for a Twitter a-ha moment: By now you can set up a positive brand mention search in Swedish, in Stockholm – Sweden. That is pretty darn specific and at the same time, very cool. Remember the cost of this tool: zero dollars. Now let’s go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Doing content research on Twitter

Are your brain slowly melting and you have no idea what you should write about? There is not shame in doing some content research to see what people are talking about right now. Twitter search to the rescue: Javascript “how to”

Twitter "how to" search

Fresh content with interactions. Sweet stuff.

Real life experience with Twitter advanced search

Why do I feel the need to write this piece on how you should use Twitter search? To put everything in perspective, I’ve been employed via Twitter talking about digital marketing with the right people (just engage with your industry peers, god damn it). This also resulted in new business for the agency I worked at. This also resulted in a few speaking gigs.

Setting up industry specifc mentions in smart, but still simple, ways have created prospects – leads and customers.

Last, but not least, I found the love of my life on Twitter. That is pretty awesome, if you ask me.

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Written By
Per is a digital strategist by heart working as a consultant in Stockholm, Sweden, mainly with SEO and web analytics but also with social media and paid search.
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