Twitter is one of the most popular social networks online, and it matters to your business. A lot. If you want to understand your clients’ needs, Twitter can help you. Right now, you’re probably scouring online reviews and analyzing them to gain new insight into what your clients think about your business. While reviews are helpful, Twitter can be even more so.
Limitations of Reviews
There are many limitations to the information you get from online reviews. In most cases, people only write online reviews when they have strong opinions. This means that you’re learning about your clients’ needs mostly from people who either love your business or hate it, and you’re hearing much less from the people in the middle with less extreme and more average viewpoints. Many times those reviews also exist with fairly little information on who posted the review, such as their demographics, other interests, etc.
Benefits of Twitter
Twitter, on the other hand, can offer you a lot more information than individual reviews can. The most obvious example would be if any Twitter users “mention” your business or products. There are lots of programs that can help you track certain mentions, terms, etc. When you identify those mentions, you have the ability to see the commenter’s entire Twitter history. From there, you can learn more about their interests, opinions, location, etc., which will give you even greater insight into their needs as your customer.
Tweeter Trending
The other big thing that Twitter can do is help you identify trends among your clients’ and the rest of the world, too. With #hashtags, you can find what’s popular, as well as track all the tweets that pertain to a certain #hashtag you’re interested in. Most importantly, you can look for trends among your own followers. Those trends can give you very important information about them and their needs, even when they’re not talking about your business in particular. Those trends can provide very valuable information for your business on how to connect with your clients, as well as how to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to trends and new ideas.
Twitter Conversations
On Twitter, you can also jump in on the conversations or start them. While you can respond to client reviews, it’s much less efficient. You can mention clients or direct message them. You can tweet out questions that would provide interesting answers from your clients, and encourage responses, especially with the use of a catchy #hashtag. A good, thought-provoking tweet could generate a much bigger and more insightful response than any one review could provide. You will be hearing from the average clients in addition to the more outspoken ones on Twitter.
If you’re not tracking the trends on Twitter, you need to start. Reviews are old news. While reviews definitely still matter, trends on Twitter are more helpful for gathering ideas that will appeal to your clients and improve your business for them.
Julie Myers is a social media manager and expert reviews tracker. She is currently teaching others about tracking new review alerts.
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