Twitter can be a powerful tool for getting your message out, but it also can become part of your business intelligence arsenal. TweetScan can help you keep track of what is being said about your company and products and get updates via email, rss or on their website. You can scan up to five phrases for daily or weekly delivery. Best of all, there are no ads or spam in the emails. It also can be used to check for lost replies and direct messages. TweetScan’s homepage has a keyword cloud representing hot topics on Twitter. You can also search for specific keywords by particular users.
Using TweetScan for business intelligence may take a bit of experimentation. Obvious keywords are your twitter username, company name and any brand names for products or services. Less obvious keywords are those which may represent hot topics in your particular industry. For those, try looking at industry blogs, forums and publications to see what’s hot and then use the TweetScan search functionality to see what people are saying about it.
Obviously this type of business intelligence works best if your industry has a large number of Twitter users. But it can still be useful for keeping track of general industry topics. Twitter’s usage is also growing fairly quickly since it easy to tweet from mobile phones, browsers and desktop applications. From a business intelligence standpoint, it is a rich environment for research because Twitter users tend to be actively engaged in the community (even if they are only broadcasting and not interacting).
If you use Twitter for Business, please share in the comments how you keep track of conversations and important topics.
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