Step 2. Topic Research
Face it – finding topics by checking out the “What’s Trending” widget doesn’t often result in a relevant match for your business.
And people who throw references to currently trending celebrities into business blog posts are more often than not doing themselves no favors at all, since they are likely to attract:
- Zero business searchers
- Annoyed searchers looking for news about their favorite celebrity – only to find one skimpy reference something along the lines of “Lady Gaga has the right idea about marketing”.
To find trends relevant to your business: Use Twitter’s own Advanced Search page.
Simply enter your keywords, and view the results.
Notice the wide, practical and useful varieties of search parameters the Advanced Search function offers:
- Words – includes hashtags, exact phrases, any or all of “these words” and “written in”
- People – you can search particular tweets to and from specific accounts, as well as searching tweets mentioning specific accounts
- Places – use geo-targeting by searching tweets mentioning specific places and nearby locations
- Other – you can also specify that posts you are searching for be positive, negative or questions. And you can include retweets.
Other Top Tips for Topic Research:
- If you want to be counted among Twitter’s top influencers, you need to know that Twitter itself measures this by the number of retweets you generate.
One quick way to increase your retweets: Keep your tweets shorter than 100 characters.
And ask your followers to “Please retweet”.
- If you want to track your own retweets, an easy, free way is to use HubSpot’s latest tool, Who Tweeted Me.
In addition to Quick Stats, the report generated when you enter a Twitter URL also reports on the URL’s most influential retweeters, as well as potential reach and timelines. (Note, however, it determines influence by the number of followers per each retweeter.)
You can also quickly drag the “Analyze in WhoTweetedMe” bookmarklet to your browser bar.
Keeping track of who retweeted you and what they retweeted can not only help you monitor your brand, but give you valuable clues as to which subjects (via your tweets) are “hot” for your followers (and target market); which ones make them interact with your tweets – and which ones leave them cold.
More in this series:
- Step 1. Twitter as a Business Research Tool
- Step 2. Topic Research
- Step 3. Finding New Audiences
- Step 4. Managing Your Followers
- Step 5. Searching and using Hashtags