Part of the purpose of getting your business involved in conversations on Twitter, Facebook and other social media forums is to inspire collaboration, communication and strategy. However, it is important to know, how to use Twitter to its fullest potential in order to take advantage of the networking opportunities available there. Not surprisingly, the most valuable skill you can have when you're engaging users in your message through Twitter is a skill that also proves vital when engaging the public in real life conversation: listening . That’s why this Listening segment is an integral component of our Twitter training. 

Keeping Your Twitter Ear On

With over 145 million users, Twitter has quickly become one of the most vocal social media sites on the Internet. So many users, however, can make it difficult for a person to identify what conversations are relevant to their business or interests. This is why it's important that you learn how to use Twitter tools and tricks that are designed to help you find and join those conversations.

Hashtags

One of the best ways to keep track of conversations on Twitter is through the use of hashtags, which make it easy to find and be a part of trending topics on Twitter. To learn how hashtags can benefit your Twitter listening skills, first you must learn how to use Twitter hashtags. By adding a pound symbol (#) in front of a keyword that you want indexed, other Twitter users will be able to find your Tweet when they search using that word. By doing a search on Twitter to find hashtags that are relevant to your business or interests, you can find out who is talking about you, your business or the areas that you are interested in finding out about.

Trending topics are also a great way to see which hashtags Twitter users are putting in their tweets and are the most popular that day. Not all trending topics will apply to your business, but from time to time, they may, and this is a great opportunity for you to join the conversations of fellow Twitter users within your target audience on a large scale.

You can also find popular hashtags used within your industry and by your target audience. Do this by using hashtag research sites, such as hashtags.org or hashtagify.me. These websites not only show you what is trending, but they also provide insight into how frequently specific tweets are used and who are the most influential Twitter users around a specific hashtag.

Twitter Search

Another way to listen to conversations on Twitter is by using the Twitter Search tool. Twitter's Search feature allows you to be tuned in to anything or anyone that you want to find out about. Just type in whatever you're searching for and Twitter will generate results that are relevant to your search topic, organizing them by most recent first. Twitter Search is one of the most powerful search engines for Twitter dialogue available today. Another search engine that provides useful information, whether it’s regarding people, topics or hashtags, is TweetScan. TweetScan is very similar to the popular search engines like Google and Bing, but it searches on Twitter only.

When you are on the Twitter Advanced Search page, which can be accessed by clicking on Advanced Search while on the main Twitter search page, you have many options to dial in your listening capabilities even further.  You may search words in a variety of different ways, such as ensuring the returns include an exact match of your desired phrase, any words, or none of certain words. You may also search by hashtag and in any language.

For advanced searching on an even higher level—say you want  to find tweets from a significant influencer like Social Media Examiner (@SMExaminer)— you can choose to find great tweets about social media marketing from this specific user or any mentions of a specific user in any tweets.

If you have a geographically centered business, try using the geographic search parameters to return tweets only in your area. Finally, you can also search by sentiment. Perhaps you want to monitor your brand for any negative sentiment; you could search your business name and check the negative box!

Play around with Advanced Search and see what you find!

Social Media Dashboards

Sometimes, a third-party application or tool can be very helpful in tracking Twitter conversations. Creating canned or filtered searches on a desktop Twitter agent like TweetDeck enables you to closely follow any conversations revolving around your search terms. You can set up searches by people, trending topics or hashtags.

Listening: One Half of Conversations

The key to maintaining effective social media discourse is to learn, like in real world conversations, listening is a big part of making your conversations on Twitter or any other social media outlet work for you. To learn more about how to use Twitter or any other social media platform and how to make it work for you, go to www.splashmediau.com.