Working in social media today can often feel like a bit of an echo chamber. Even if you think your audience like your posts, how do you truly know? Engagements that used to be measured in page likes, shares, retweets and clicks is at an all time low. For brands and businesses, audiences have become ghosts who scroll through content without a second glance. Even those who click on content and read it, often don’t like or share it.
This got us thinking at Twilert; how can Twitter search help us to better understand our customers and the ways in which we can best help them on social media? Here are a few ideas we came up with.
Twitter Echo Chamber Guide
Escape Plan: Seeking out conversations on Twitter
With the right combination of keywords, it’s actually super simple to find out what your customers are talking about online. From the questions they’re asking, to the problems they’re stuck on. Twitter search is a powerful database of user tweets. All you have to do is delve into them using the right combination of keywords.
The best way to do this is to think of your keywords and those that would mirror real conversations. For example, if you work in marketing you may create a Twitter search that says:
Marketing email ? does anyone know
This mirrors conversational dialect from those tweeting ‘does anyone know how to do email marketing more effectively?’ or even ‘does anyone know a marketing specialist that can help with our email?’. Both of which, may be questions you can help support on.
The trick with using Twitter search to uncover key conversations is to limit your search to around four or five keywords from a sentence. Searching ‘can anyone recommend a freelance marketer in London?’ will only find tweets that contain all eight of those keywords – highly unlikely right? Use limited keywords that mirror real language to make it easy to jump in on conversations and listen just that little bit harder.
Finding topics outside of the echo chamber
In classic echo chamber fashion and down to social media’s super clever algorithms, when we engage with one type of audience on a channel, that audience becomes the only one we can engage with.
Case in point; on Twitter if you always like and engage with highly political tweets as an interest, you’ll find that your Who to follow, Here’s what you missed and even your Moments become full of highly political tweets and users.
This is great for a time, but how can you break out of that to find the people or conversations you might not have engaged with before? When using Twitter for business, there could be a whole cohort of customers you’ve just not discovered yet.
Twitter search allows you to break out of the echo. Simply add in a few keywords, save it as a search (or as a Twilert to get email notifications and digests) and you get a glance into what else is going on, as often as you need it.
This could be keeping up to date with a new industry trend, a specific event or realtime occasion or even updates from a competitor to ensure you don’t get left behind.
If you service multiple clients or work within multiple industries, this gives you a way to stay at the peak of each, without seriously confusing your algorithms and the people that you like to follow on a personal level.
For example, setting up the keywords Snapchat news 2017 as a Twilert will ensure that you see all of the most important Snapchat updates and releases that might affect you or your clients.
Curating and sharing unique content
One of the reasons social media, and Twitter in particular, has become such an echo chamber is because of the lack of time users have to sit and scroll.
Tweets with a low level of engagement are deemed as irrelevant or less important and those with high engagement are pushed to the top. It means that anyone within the same industry, or with linked interests, sees the same content over and over from the same accounts.
In order to stay on the pulse of new content, it’s important to dig a little deeper. This is where Twitter search comes in super handy. By creating searches that cover all of your most important keywords, you can find the content that no one else is sharing yet. Your results aren’t just limited to the people you follow, or the people they follow, they span across Twitter in its entirety, creating a feed that hardly anyone else is utilizing.
Not only does this help you stay on the pulse of new and exciting viewpoints, it also allows you to share the viewpoints with your audience.
Top tip: When looking for content to curate add in the Twitter search operator filter:links. This will filter the results with your keywords but only when they contain article or web links.
Using Twitter alerts to stay out of the echo chamber
One of the biggest barriers of seeing Twitter as a huge potential search engine is time. Many don’t have the resource to sit on Twitter, sift out the good content and cut down the noise to find the right tweets, articles and users to connect with.
The beauty of Twitter alerts is that they cut out the noise and remind busy business types of the tweets they need to respond to or read fast. Being first on the scene of news, opportunities and industry highlights.
Breaking out of the echo chamber and using Twitter alerts to be reminded each day that there’s plenty more content than that which we see in our feeds is a huge competitive advantage.
Ready to give it a go? Set up our 30-day free trial of Twitter alerts at www.twilert.com.
