Using Twitter Searches To Improve Your Brand

Twitter is a powerful tool for businesses to control their message and stay in touch with their customers, but in order to be properly leveraged it’s important you stay connected to every conversation that touches on your brand – not just the ones that reach out to you. In order to do that, it’s important to have some tools in place to be steadily tracking Twitter for keywords and phrases related to your brand, so that if a conversation does involve your brand, you can intervene when necessary, to let your customers know you care, to build a larger following, and to address potential problems before they devolve.

Use Twitter Search @

The simplest way to track your brand on Twitter is to use the built in search for @brandname. This will show any tweets that have utilized your brand as a special keyword or phrase. Of course, many conversations in Twitter fail to use the @ nomenclature, so you’ll need to take it a step further to make sure you don’t miss out.

Create a RSS Feed with Keywords

The main Twitter search can also filter for keywords, and one feature you may not know about is the ability to seamlessly create an RSS feed out of these search results. By building an RSS feed comprised of a suite of keywords and phrases relating to your brand – not simply the brand name itself, but product lines and other unique descriptors people might use when discussing your brand – you will receive up-to-the-minute notifications whenever your brand comes up.

Twitter Applications

For those that don’t use an RSS feeder already, a number of Twitter applications exist that offer similar capabilities. TweetDeck is probably the most widely used, allowing you to build robust search panels utilizing a number of keywords, and to filter these searches in many different ways. TweetDeck can then be left running in the background, and may be set to provide you with regular notifications when new conversations around your brand appear.