01 Dec Charity Web Marketing: Preparing your New Routine with Twitter
After discussing monitoring social media for charity web marketing, who should monitor social media, listening and responding and setting realistic goals, we get to preparing your new charity web marketing routine using Twitter.
In order to successfully monitor social media for charity in just 10 minutes a day, you’ll need to have some things prepared in advance. Even visiting each social network’s URL and logging in could take up to 10 minutes a day. We’ll show you a way you can limit that as much as possible by creating a daily plan upfront to help you streamline your process.
If you are considering investing in a paid tool to help aid your monitoring, there are a handful that help with social media monitoring, interacting, and marketing strategy. The value here is not only in the ability to both monitor and react within the tool itself, but to also track how these conversations integrate with your entire marketing strategy.
For now, let’s talk about each social network assuming you don’t have any paid tools readily available. Some free social media monitoring tools you might want to check out include TweetDeck, Google Alerts, Topsy, and Social Mention. Ready to jump in? Let’s discuss what specifically you’ll need to monitor on each social network, and how you can consolidate and consume the most important information every day.
The great thing about Twitter is that there’s a world of possibility out there for things you can search and discover. However, this can also lead to information overload and monitoring in 10 hours a day instead of 10 minutes. You’ll have to pick and choose exactly what you want to monitor, and if it’s an effective use of your time based on how many mentions that stream gets and if it’s useful for your brand. The following list includes some streams we suggest you start with. These lists could be arranged side by side in TweetDeck or included as immediate email notifications in Social Inbox. No matter which tool you use, make sure you’re testing out frequency and usefulness of these lists for yourself. If one list isn’t getting much action — nix it and save yourself some time!
Twitter mentions and searches.
In an earlier section, this ebook listed different kinds of tweets you should be monitoring on a regular basis, depending on your department or role. Let’s simplify that. Most likely (if you’re taking the free approach), you are looking for industry tweets, @replies, and mentions of your business. Go to twitter.com/ search where you can conduct searches for your competitors, industry terms, executives’ names, and whatever else may be relevant to your business. Feeling a little ambitious and want something slightly more real-time? Use a tool like TweetDeck where you can save searches and react via the tool itself without needing to log into Twitter.
Relevant questions about your company.
If someone tweets, “Should I buy X product or its competitor’s product?” you want to be ready to respond. If not directly by offering helpful content about your business, perhaps you could point that person to a customer of yours.
Relevant questions about your industry.
Being helpful by answering someone’s question is a great way to develop credibility with that person. In the event they need a product or service related to the one(s) your business provides, they might end up coming to you!
Requests for support
If a customer tweets a request for help (either directly to you or perhaps to their network), you should notice that tweet and respond accordingly. Happy customers are essential for the long-term results of your business.
Complaints and feedback.
Critics are always out there, and it’s important to acknowledge and resolve issues as they come up.
Praise.
Please sir, can I have some more? Praise is a wonderful thing to receive! Why not say thank you? Retweet it. Save it to your favorites. Send that person a t-shirt! It’s wise to appreciate those who appreciate you.
Competitor mentions.
Competitor intel, anyone? Other people are praising, complaining, and asking questions about your competitors, too. You should monitor those conversations, if only for the information and data.
Now that you know which types of tweets to specifically monitor, you can create your plan accordingly. Keyword searches are an excellent way to filter through the masses of tweets to find the messages you’re looking for. Use a tool that allows you to save keyword searches as a live stream so you won’t miss out on what’s being said about your brand, your industry and your products. You can do this using a free tool like TweetDeck, or a paid tool like HubSpot’s Social Inbox, where you can also receive an email when someone matches an important search term you’ve identified.
