How Twitter Search Can Change Your Life!

I had the pleasure of speaking to a marketing group in Birmingham earlier this week. One of the things I spoke about was how Twitter Search is a vitally important tool in your marketing arsenal.

Being a relatively short presentation, I wasn’t able to invest a lot of time going into the details, so I thought I would jot down a few thoughts and ideas here…based on the questions I received following the presentation…

So, first things first: go to search.twitter.com. You will see this:

Here, you can type in any word, phrase, or #hashtag (how people categorize tweets) and what results is a listing of ALL tweets that mention that word or phrase… Why is this important?

Let’s say you sell widgets. And you sell widgets in Metro Atlanta. Wouldn’t you want to know if ANYONE in Metro Atlanta is talking about widgets (the answer is YES, in case you are wondering). Perhaps they are having a problem with their widget, and need help. Maybe they are looking to replace their current widget. Maybe they know a friend who is looking for a widget.

Well, I will tell you something. If someone mentions widgets on Twitter, I dang sure want to know about it. Because then, I can take action on it. How? Twitter Search. Twitter Search allows you to set up a listening post for any key word, phrase, person, city that you want to monitor…

In fact, you can go a whole lot deeper with your search by clicking on “advanced search.” Which brings you this screen:

As you will see on this page, advanced search gives you many more options in refining your search. My favorite, of course, is the “Places” field. Here is where you can refine your “widget” search to Metro Atlanta, even going so far as to selecting the mileage radius around your geographical selection.

Example:

When marketing for a local restaurant that serves gluten-free food, I, as the marketing guy, set up a Twitter search for anyone in Metro Atlanta that tweets about gluten. I see them ALL. And if appropriate, I would have the restaurant respond to that individual tweet. Most of the time, those tweets were looking for places that served gluten-free food, were searching for gluten-free specials, or had general questions about gluten, which we were happy to answer.

As a result of setting up this search, we booked TWO large “Gluten-free” events at the restaurant – in less than a month – just from people we met on Twitter as a result of finding them on the search…

So, why is Twitter Search important?

1. Do you want to keep an eye on what Twitter is saying about you?

2. Do you want to keep an eye on what Twitter is saying about your business?

3. Your market?

4. Your market space?

5. Your customers?

6. Your prospects?

7. Your competitors?

8. Your products?

9. Your services?

10. What if you could identify people who are looking to buy?

11. What if you could identify people who are having a problem that you could help them solve?

12. What if people were requesting information that you could easily provide?

These are just some of things you can do with Twitter Search. The are no limits. The wealth of information is almost overwhelming. Which leads to my final point. How in the heck do I manage all of this incoming data?

Simple, actually, take a look at the search query below:

This is a search result from my Twitter stream as of 1235pm ET, Friday, September 24th. If you look at the image, upper right, you will see an orange button that reads “Feed for this query.”

Clicking this button automatically feeds all the search results into your RSS reader. So, you can aggregate all this information into one place, where you can quickly scan the results and identify opportunities with which to take meaningful action.

Disclosure: you will need to experiment with this. You will need to test different types of phrasing, geographical boundaries, etc. With continued testing, you will ultimately hone your skills, and you will be able to get through tons of data that can move your business forward.

I have been utilizing twitter search actively for over a year, and I am still learning, still tweaking how I use it, and still uncovering new ways to parse and understand information. It is a continual learning process.

Understand that, take action on the data you receive, and you will soon agree, effective implementation of twitter search will change your business life forever…

What do you think? What are some other ways to use Twitter Search?