The Corporate Guide to Monitoring Twitter Conversations in 5 Steps

These days every company wants to have a social media presence.  As many would expect, Twitter is perhaps the most difficult for a company to manage because it’s nothing more than streaming, real-time conversations.  How can a company manage millions of conversations minute by minute?  The short answer is that unless you have lots of people working on it 24-hours a day, you can’t.  But here’s what you can do to effectively manage your brand in 5 easy steps:

1. Create a Twitter handle for your company or brand to use as a customer service and news platform.   This is most useful to announce news, point followers to relevant content, offer specials, and resolve customer service complaints/questions.
2. Then create a Twitter handle for the C-level executives (or at the very least, the CEO).  These types of accounts are becoming very popular (@richardbrandon of Virgin, for example)  because they allow a level of transparency that was previously impossible to attain.  This is good for tweeting during board meetings, giving little snippets of the day-to-day operations of the company, and for the thoughts of the executive so as to make them appear human and not simply the biggest cog in the corporate machine.
3. Go to Twitter Search and create searches for your brand, your company, your competitors, industry topics, and relevant people.  Some Boolean is allowed so be sure to make ample use of the “AND” function so as not to create millions of RSS feeds.  To create an RSS feed, simply do a search and click the “RSS Feed” button at the top right.  This will alert you in real-time when any of those search criteria are mentioned in a tweet.  I suggest you set the RSS feed up through Outlook (unless you use any other RSS-capable program more frequently than Outlook).
4. Dedicate people in your company to monitoring various feeds, dependant upon the size of your company.  A search like “Rubbermaid” AND “Sucks” OR “Terrible” OR “Worst” should create a feed that the customer service department should respond to.
5. If your company is large and/or there too many conversations happening at once, make sure to prioritize which types of tweets are the most valuable to the brand.  As a general rule, tweets that alter your brand adversely (complaints and rants, spreading of misinformation, etc.) should be responded to first.

Thanks to Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) for the tweet that spawned this post.