With about 9,100 tweets tweeted every second, Twitter is a clamorous platform, making it easy for your tweets to get lost in the sea of rival tweets.  The upside of having a veritable ocean of content is that you can use Twitter as a listening tool, by using hashtags to mine for conversations that are pertinent to your company or brand.  Hashtags can be useful tools for elevating tweets, or piggybacking onto trending topics for a boost in relevance, but they are also like built-in topic markers.  

First, start by monitoring relevant hashtags.  Just use Twitter’s search bar to look for any topic that might pertain to your work or business, like #writersblock if you need content for bloggers, or #socialmediatips if you cater to start-up companies.  

Next, after you have a list of applicable hashtags, spend some time every day monitoring the resulting conversations.  These threads can be useful for finding content to provide clients/consumers, or for finding clients/consumers in the first place.  Be on the lookout for tweets that mention a specific problem that align with the services of your brand.  

Lastly, once you’ve found some open conversation threads you can become a part of, make sure you focus on providing information, and not just pushing a marketing message.  If you engage potential consumers honestly and provide sincere help, the marketing work is already done!

 

Visit Social Media Examiner for a more detailed look into the process.