Using Twitter and TweetDeck for Effective CI
As I mentioned previously, Twitter is becoming a more relevant source for competitive intelligence. Not necessarily as a standalone source, but a nice complement to traditional sources. One of the great things about Twitter is the number of third party tools that have been developed to help you get the most out of the service. In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts on how I use TweetDeck, one of my personal favorites, for CI.
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to give an all encompassing tutorial of TweetDeck. If you’d like one of those, there are plenty of good ones out there. What I am trying to do is give some insight on how the tool can help you filter the huge amount of content flowing through the Twitter service to get information that is relevant for your competitive intelligence purposes.
There are a couple of basics when it comes to using TweetDeck. First is the concept of columns. Columns are a way to get different views of the the information streaming from Twitter. There are a lot of ways to filter a TweetDeck column. As in my last post, I’ll break it down by three different categories: People, Companies, Topics/Products.
I’ll start with people. Following people on Twitter recently got easier with the advent of Lists. You can create a list in Twitter of the people that you want to follow. These of course can include executives from a company you’re tracking, people who often comment on a company or topic your tracking, etc. Once your Twitter lists are created, TweetDeck can quickly create a column based on one of them. You can also create a column in TweetDeck based on a search. With respect to people, you can simply search for the @ mention of the user (for example @marcbenioff). This will allow you to see the things people are saying to a particular person on Twitter, and a great way to understand what topics a person is discussing or directed towards that person by the masses on Twitter.
For companies the process is much the same as people. You can create a list in Twitter that follows the people, products, and company feeds associated with a particular company. For example a Twitter list for SalesForce might include @marcbenioff, @salesforce, @joywang (social media analyst that often comments on salesforces adoption of social media). You may also want to create a column that is based on a search, again using Salesforce as an example you may want to create a column based on hashtags and or keywords (“#salesforce OR salesforce”). This will get you all the other mentions of a company name.
The same process used for companies can be followed for products or topics. Find the people that often talk about a particular product or topic, as well as create a search for mentions of the product name or topic.
Once you have your columns created in TweetDeck, you can now start using some of the powerful tools and analytics that that are part of the solution. At the bottom of each column in TweetDeck there is a row of buttons. One of my favorites is the “Cloud” button. By clicking this, you can quickly get a cloud tag of the most popular things being mentioned in that column. That includes keywords, links, twitter usernames, and hashtags. Great way to do some high level analytics and get a quick picture of what you need to know about what is happening right now.
Next is the “Filter” tag. This will allow you to filter a column by text, time, source, or name. For example, we could filter the SalesForce product column by the word “performance”, allowing you to see anything related salesforce.com performance.
There are also options to mark everything in the column as seen, thereby cleaning up the column entirely, or just cleaning up the entries you have actually seen.
These are just some of the ways TweetDeck can help Twitter become a more useful tool for competitive intelligence. Just to reiterate, I think Twitter is a great part of any CI monitoring strategy. Especially with respect to the conversation that is currently happening around the people, companies, and products or topics you are following.
If you have any other helpful hints with respect to TweetDeck, please do share!
- Ken
