Twitter is absolutely massive with over 307 million active users sending over 6,000 tweets per second! It’s also a fantastic way that you can engage with people talking about your products or services, your company or even competing companies.

Twitter itself is a little bit limited when it comes to options for following certain topics or keywords but this is where Hootsuite comes in.

Hootsuite is a fantastic app for managing social media accounts. If you have any sort of social media strategy Hootsuite is an absolute necessity as it makes everything a thousand times easier to manage. Plus it’s only $9.99 USD a month so you really have no excuse not to use it.

This post is going to detail how you can use Hootsuite to dominate Twitter.

Setting Up Hootsuite

The first thing you’re going to want to do is log into Hootsuite and then click on your name and the blank owl icon in the upper right of the screen to go to the page where you can add social networks.

Click “+Add a Social Network” and then “Connect with Twitter”. It’ll ask you for your twitter username and password. Enter those and click “Authorize app”. After a few seconds you should find yourself back in Hootsuite with a success message.

Click on the House icon in the sidebar that says streams. Here you can create tabs for different projects. I like to organize everything in a tab because you can have multiple streams of tweets in a tab. So I keep related streams together to keep things simple.

After you create the tab you should see something that looks like this.

We have different options here for what kinds of streams you can set up and you can set up some pretty cool things.

@ Mentions

The first stream you should set up is a stream of your @ Mentions. This will basically be a stream of anyone who ever tweets and includes @yourusername.

Usually if anyone has a questions for you they’ll mention you like this. Sometimes if people complain or have positive comments they’ll mention you as well.

These are people who are directly engaging with you so you definitely want to see a stream of these tweets.

Setting up this stream is as easy as clicking the @ mentions icon.

You’ll see a new stream automatically gets added to the left.

Mentions of your company name and website

Another two streams you’re definitely going to want to keep an eye on are mentions of your company name or brand and your website.
To set this up click on the search icon under “Add a stream”.

Here you’ll see a list of trending topics that you probably don’t care about so just ignore them.

In the search field type your company name and hit “search”. Another stream will appear to the left.

This stream will have a list of any tweets that include your company name. If anyone ever mentions your company either positively or negatively it’ll show up here and you can easily tweet them back.

Click on search again and set up another stream for your website name keep it simple like yoursite.com.

This will set up another stream of tweets that include your website in it. Any time anyone shares a link to your website it’ll show up here.

This is great to keep tabs on what pages on your website are being shared and what people are saying about your website on Twitter.

Mentions of your products and services

If you have any specific products or services you want to track go ahead and set up streams for them just like you did with your company name and website.

Click on search and enter the words you want to search for. For example if you’re selling condos in a particular city enter condos and the city name. This will give you a stream of tweets of anyone who makes a tweet with the words condos and “your city”, like in the screenshot below.

If there are any hashtags that you want to follow you can enter them here too.

Mentions of your Competition and their Websites

Just like you set up streams for your own name and website set up streams for your competitors’ company names and websites as well.

This lets you see exactly what people are saying about your competition and what they’re sharing from their websites.

How to Take Advantage of all these Twitter streams

A couple of times a day log into Hootsuite and check your streams. Hootsuite has a mobile app that makes this very easy. If you have a few minutes you can pull out the app and check your streams.

You can even set notifications if you want to see when there’s new tweets in a stream. That might be going overboard a little bit though. It’s up to you how hardcore you want to get.

One really great thing about Twitter is that people don’t mind being tweeted at by people, especially if they’ve asked a question.

If anyone @ mentions you then you probably want to tweet them back as soon as possible, either to answer their question or thank them for what they said.

If anyone asks questions about your products or services feel free to tweet them back to answer their questions.

Twitter isn’t the place to go hardcore with sales. If, for example, someone tweets that they’re starting to shop for a condo in their city though, and you’re a realtor, feel free to tweet them back. Something like, “Good luck! Condo hunting can be a lot of fun and if you have any questions we’d love to help” works great.

If someone mentions that they’ve had a bad experience with one of your competitors feel free to tweet them back but be careful. Don’t push how your company is better.

An excellent example I saw once of how to tweet back when people mention your competitors was a person who went to Las Vegas and had a terrible experience checking into their hotel.

They went on Twitter and tweeted about their terrible experience. Minutes later a rival hotel tweeted back something like “We’re very sorry to hear that you had a bad experience, we hope the rest of your trip to Vegas is awesome.”

That’s a very low key message but next time that person visits Las Vegas they’re probably going to stay at the hotel that tweeted them back.

In conclusion

Hopefully this gives you some ideas of what you can do with Twitter. Although I’m not a fan of social media marketing I do like how Twitter lets you directly interact with people who mention you, your competitors or whatever topics you search for.

This is a very powerful strategy that should at most take a few minutes out of your day and has no costs other than a $9.99 USD a month Hootsuite subscription. I highly recommend you start using Twitter in this way for your business.