How to Use TweetDeck As a Brand Monitoring Platform For Twitter

Posted: 25 Nov 2013 06:00 AM PST

It’s deceptively easy to monitor your brand and industry mentions online. Sure, you can do some amazingly sophisticated and valuable breakdowns with expensive monitoring suites, but for the average brand a lot of their basic monitoring needs can be covered by free tools. In this post I wanted to walk you through how you can do some very simple brand monitoring on Twitter with TweetDeck for Chrome.

Before we talk about using these tools, let’s backup and talk some basic monitoring for your brand on Twitter. First, what exactly should you be monitoring?

Start with brand mentions. Make sure you are aware of what’s being said about your brand and also who is saying it. You want to know what’s the conversation around your brand and who is driving it.

From there, you should also monitor industry mentions. You want to be able to keep up with what’s happening in your industry and also what your competitors are up to. You can literally extend this and monitor brand mentions for your competitors. It can give you a quick and easy way to see how your competitors respond to customers on Twitter or even if they respond.

Now based on your resources, at this point you can also break it down further and monitor mentions of specific product lines or key executives within your company. Or another example would be if your company has a major product reveal at an upcoming industry event, you could monitor the hashtag for that event and then track reaction to the reveal in real-time!

Now I want to show you how I do this with TweetDeck for Chrome:

There’s four columns showing”

1 – Interactions: This shows me replies as well as when someone retweets me or favorites one of my tweets. It also shows me when someone follows me or adds me to a list.

2 – Mentions: This shows me replies as well as retweets. A bit of redundancy here, so if you want to create several columns you could probably go with just Interactions. Pro Tip: You could also make a search term for your user name (ie mine would be ‘mackcollier’) and that would show you your replies as well as tweets you have left.

3 – #Blogchat tweets: This column is for a search I am doing for the #Blogchat hashtag. I typically use TweetDeck for Chrome to participate in #Blogchat. You can use this for search term you want.

4 – Super6: This is a private List I have created of a few marketing/social media pros that I follow because I know they create and share awesome content. These tweets help me stay up to date on what’s happening in my space, and it also helps me find valuable content to share with others. Twitter Lists are a very powerful tool for your social media marketing toolbelt and I’ll talk more about them here tomorrow.

But what’s great about TweetDeck is that it also gives you a very simple way to not only monitor for your brand, but to distribute information found and share it with your team.

Here’s an example. Look at the tweet from David Brown. When I click on the … under the tweet to the right, all these other options open up. I can Tweet to him, Unfollow, etc. But note the final two options: Link to this Tweet and Email this Tweet. This is very powerful because these two options give you a very easy way to share tweets with co-workers. For example, let’s say you work for a brand and in monitoring brand mentions, you come across a customer that leaves a reply to your Twitter account asking a technical question about one of your products that you can’t answer. With the Email this Tweet option, you can send an email off to a SME (Subject Matter Expert) within your brand that can give you the information you need to answer this customer’s issue!

Now I want to stress that obviously TweetDeck has some severe limitations in functionality and features that it can offer you. And a lot of this can also be accomplished by using similar tools such as HootSuite. The point I wanted to make with this post was to show you that social media monitoring doesn’t have to be complicated. And even if your brand isn’t getting thousands of mentions a day and can’t afford (or need) a robust social media monitoring suite like Radian6 or Sysomos doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be monitoring. I’d much rather you dip your toes in the waters and try some of this stuff for yourself vs just think ‘oh social media monitoring is something only big companies need to worry about’. If anyone is online taking about your brand and/or your industry, then you need to know what they are saying, period.