Yesterday I attended my first Twitter chat. EVER. I chose Madalyn Sklar’s #TwitterSmarter chat with guest Mira Joleigh | Life Coach. This week’s topic in focus was social listening. As a social media manager and a current social media graduate student at the University of Florida, this topic is very relevant to my daily life and coursework. As Mira Joleigh said best, social listening means “following what people are saying about your business and about your industry; tuning in to the needs of your market; looking for themes and insights.” We live in a digital age where we are able to have meaningful conversations “in the moment” with customers and potential customers. This opportunity to connect better through social listening is crucial to being successful.
Why bother with social listening? Many businesses believe they do not need to keep “tabs” on customers or competition, but in reality social listening is much more than that. Some major advantages to social listening described by Mira Joleigh include:
· Product development
· Investor relations
· Customer delight
· New leads
· Anticipate demands
· Discover new trends
· Verify effects of marketing campaign
· Identify influencers and leaders
· Helps avoid PR/communication meltdowns
In this fast-paced Twitter chat, we dove even deeper into social listening than I would have imagined. In one hour there were over 1,095 tweets from 107 profiles, with 8 million users reached. Ideas were constantly bouncing off of each other and the support within the community was inspiring. I expected to be intimidated in my first Twitter chat but everyone was supportive of each other’s ideas and they made it easy to share my own ideas as well.
A big takeaway from this chat is when Madalyn Sklar discussed how often and frequent we should be social listening. She said social listening “is something you should always be doing. Make it a daily ritual.” I could not agree more. I have a routine each morning with my morning coffee going through relevant social content.
Efficiently conducting social listening is key in a massive social media world. Content is always growing, therefore it is important to use tools to monitor social media. TweetDeck is a tool Mira Joleigh recommended. On this application you can find your target market easier, and you can create multiple columns for each keyword to monitor. I look forward to playing with TweetDeck in order to better monitor social media.
Overall, I will definitely attend more Twitter chats in the future. I am almost kicking myself that I haven’t attended one before. There is so much knowledge on the internet but I found that Twitter chats bring a social connection to learning online and it’s an honor to be in a social community that is so willing to share information and support others.
