Find Your Flock on Twitter
Sort through the billions of tweets on Twitter to find your audience. Leverage tools to find and share the most relevant updates.
Billions of tweets, thousands of accounts and your feed escaping down the screen rapidly, Twitter can be a bewildering place. Filtering out the noise to find the useful scraps of information or tweeting out into the Twitterverse often feels like an act of faith.
Twitter is trying hard to make itself easier to use with a slew of recent launches from it's newly algorithmic newsfeed to the 'Connect' feature and Twitter Moments, which aims to organise some of the things happening on the network into an easy to read format.
However, there are a few key strategies that will help you get you message out to the right people and easily find the most relevant accounts and tweets for your business or industry.
Follow to be followed is a fair strategy, especially in the early days as you build your follower count. However, it is always wise to try to keep it fairly relevant to your company. As your follow count grows, your newsfeed will start to race down the page like an F1 car off the grid. To make some sense of all these snippets of wisdom, it is a good idea to apply some filtering.
Download Tweetdeck and you are on your way to method in the madness. Tweetdeck is a British app that was acquired by Twitter itself and is a great way to organise single or multiple Twitter accounts. It has a layout that is a series of columns across the screen. In each column you can place the newsfeed of a different Twitter account. More usefully, you can also use it to display saved searches or Twitter lists.
A Twitter list is your saviour from the random stream of information flowing from Twitter's global hivemind. Go through the accounts you are following and start to add them to themed lists. Think about what type of information or news you are looking to follow on Twitter. You might create lists for clients or competitors, you could collect a list of influencers and news sources that are relevant to your business. By sorting into a list, you can create a newsfeed within Tweetdeck that is solely made up of tweets from those accounts. This will allow you to quickly catch up on a set of accounts, interact and retweet their posts or just stay on top of the latest news.
Saved searches is the other way to make Twitter work harder for you. By choosing certain keywords that are core to what you are trying to communicate or understand via Twitter, you can see all the individual tweets featuring that word or words in a column. You might save a search for a name, a brand or look for mentions of a product or place name for example. Again, this hones down the stream to something manageable and themed and also reaches beyond the accounts you are following to any mention of that important keyword.
Other useful Tweetdeck features include aggregating multiple account mentions and messages into a single column and easily following account notifications via a separate column.
Unlike Facebook, there is no native post scheduling tool for Twitter and you can't easily switch between different accounts via desktop. Tweetdeck solves both these problems as you can schedule posts ahead for single or multiple Twitter accounts and you can use a tick box system to choose which account identity you are tweeting from next. No messy logging out and back into another account.
Downloading Tweetdeck will be a revelation in increasing your enjoyment and efficiency on Twitter and best of all, it is completely free.
Bluebell Digital helps clients run effective social media and digital campaigns and write great content people want to share.
(c) 2016 Barney Durrant