Social Media: Top Five Twitter Tools For Business Intelligence
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Written By Miguel Cancino | December 3, 2008 | Share This
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Now that Twitter’s novelty as a micro-blogging platform has worn off, smart individuals and companies are thinking of ways they can leverage this new technology to improve their lives and businesses. Yesterday, Noah Mallin wrote about how businesses can user Twitter to find qualified leads and to understand the needs of their clients.
Today, I thought it would be helpful to point to some tools that can streamline this process, and can provide overarching business intelligence for your company. The following are my top five picks for the most valuable tools that can help your company gain valuable business intelligence from Twitter.
- TweetScan: When it comes to business intelligence, your first priority should always be to know and track what is being said about your company. TweetScan is a free service that will monitor a set of keywords, such as your company name or industry, and automatically send you E-mail alerts whenever somebody “tweets” about those terms. Think Google Alerts for Twitter.
- Twist: Smart companies stay ahead of their competitors by keeping on top of trends. Twist is a great tool that lets you quickly compare the frequency of conversation around selected terms, allowing you to see what’s hot and what’s not. Furthermore, if you notice a spike in conversation on a particular day, you can drill down and see the actual “tweets” that make up the surge. In short, Twist is a great way to analyze trends.
- Twellow: If your business markets to a particular vertical, than it is important to find, follow, and create relationships with people in that industry segment. Twellow is a search directory that goes one step further by slotting individuals and businesses on Twitter into industry verticals/categories. Twellow is one of the best ways to find individuals in your target market.
- Monitter: If you’re interested in comparing your company, product, or services to that of your competitors, Monitter is a great tool. Enter 3 keywords, such as your company and two primary competitors, and Monitter will show you a streaming real-time list of what people are saying about you and your competitors. If your company has multiple products, you can also use this tool to see how various products are viewed compared to one another.
- Bit.ly: Though not a Twitter-specific tool, Bit.ly lends itself quite well to Twitter. This URL shortening tool, which helps you keep your “tweets” to 140 characters, also provides interesting link-analytics. If you’re interested in tracking and analyzing how well your links (to your company’s products, services, etc.) perform when you seed them in Twitter, this is the tool for you. Bit.ly allows you to track the number of clicks, referring sites, clicks by country, and more. The end-goal should always be to determine which of your links are performing well and why.
Once you add these Twitter tools to your company’s arsenal you can begin to leverage Twitter for critical business, competitor, and industry intelligence. If you have any questions or comments, or you can think of additional tools that your company uses for business intelligence, feel free to send them my way on Twitter @mcancino.
Topics: Social Media, Twitter |
Great top 5 for corporate and business twitter users. The company I work for just started to use twitter a few weeks ago and I am the moderator. These tips and tools are very helpful as there is a big difference in twitter for personal use and business use. Great Column!
Twitter def. takes some time for companies to figure out how to best apply to their business model. What works for one company will not always work for others. The best way to find out is to test.
@Travis - Glad you found these tools useful. Twitter really has emerged as a great tool for businesses…when they use it correctly. As you continue to use Twitter for your company, just remember that cardinal rule of social media: make sure to add value to the community. Good luck!
@Nick - I completely agree. As you’ve probably seen, too many companies jump in head first before really think about how best to utilize social media platforms like Twitter. Like you said, the companies that get it right are the ones that spend time figuring out what works and what doesn’t. The key is to not be afraid to adjust your strategy accordingly.
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This might sound trite but if you use ow.ly or is.gd rather than bit.ly then you can squeeze just *one* more character out