How to Use Twitter to Research Like a Pro

It used to be that if you wanted to perform a search on twitter, it wasn't so easy to find, in fact you had to visit search.twitter.com to see a simple search box (which still exists). As the service improved, they have made the search box more prominent to users. Today it is on the home page.

Many get excited when it comes to following celebrities, professional athletes and authors, but what about using it as a research tool for business?

The great thing about using this strategy is that once they are setup you are only a few clicks away to see updates for a given term. Here are some ideas businesses should consider monitoring on Twitter.

Now in order to do a search, simply login to your account (login is important for saving and referencing the search going forward), and search one term at a time that is common to your industry. For example if you specialize in helping businesses make the most of social media marketing, you might monitor terms like:

social media marketing
social media marketing strategy
social media optimization

...to name a few.

Here you want to drill down to terms prospects commonly when looking for a solution (you) to their problem. I understand that those who want to take advantage of social media marketing might search using terms such as:

facebook marketing strategies (or tips or ideas)
twitter marketing strategies (or tips or ideas)
facebook for business

Continuing with this idea, you might also consider monitoring brands that exist which support the industry you serve. If you are not yet monitoring your company, brand, or products, do that first! In our social media marketing example, you might monitor terms such as:

hootsuite
tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter)
mashable

There are plenty of software packages in the social media marketing space, but which ones are on the move, which ones are getting new features, and which ones have satisfied customers? Here are some terms that could be monitored in an effort to get more traction.

twitter bot reviews
tweet adder review
hootsuite review

1.) Login to Twitter
It's important to login so that we can save our search term for easy monitoring later on.

2.) Search using the search box at the top
Pretty easy to find this. Top. Left.

3.) Save your searched term
Click the "Save this Search" button.

4.) Monitor your search term.
See the screenshot. You can quickly pull up saved search terms.

When you get savvy with Twitter you might be wondering if there is decent software out there that can help automate much of this. While there are some free services that can piecemeal some things together, there have been equally as many paid software services that have come and gone. If you want to learn about one that has remained the leader for some time, have a look at this review of tweet adder. As you'll see, a ton of features, and supports both Mac and PC.

For those more savvy among us when it comes to search, these resources are for you. Twitter does support advanced search parameters and even has a page with example operators users can use. Good stuff if you have a large market and want to narrow down to finer details.

http://search.twitter.com/advanced
http://search.twitter.com/operators

While this article focuses on businesses using Twitter for research these concepts apply to nearly every industry, market, or walk of life. Consider how you can take this focus to a local market area. Using the right search terms you can identify people looking for a good electrician in your area, or determine the top 10 complaints customers have of their electrician, and address those items in your sales process. The sky is the limit as to what you can search when using advance search and operators.

Have a second look at this article and see how it can apply to your situation.

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