Twitter has been my favorite social media platform for ages, and while some users find it difficult to navigate at first, no other app provides so much opportunity to be heard.

Sure, an update on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok can go viral and reach a massive audience, but it takes a lot of luck for that to happen. On Twitter, you can get seen and heard quite easily, by simply tagging a brand and/or a media publication. It’s the most open platform out there. 

That openness also makes it the best resource for brands and marketers to monitor, because it’s often where people go to voice their opinions, as they seek to get a brand’s attention in the public sphere. Tuning into such can provide significant research benefits – if you’re listening in.

To help with this, here are three less discussed Twitter monitoring tricks to add into your process.

Monitor Twitter Bio Changes

How much attention have you ever given to Twitter bios?

There’s not much space allowed for users/brands to describe themselves, so they need to make the most of it, and by paying attention to such, you can often get a better ideas as to what really matters most to each user.

Along the same line, when someone makes a change to their Twitter bio, this usually signals that something significant happening, like a new project, a career change or a milestone of relevance.

Reaching out to users to congratulate them on such can be a valuable brand tactic, when used the right why. 

You can also use bio monitoring to help:

• Building relationships with influencers
• Converting high-profile leads
• Make friends with niche journalists and media publications

So how do you do it?

Visualping is a great tool to set up Twitter bio change alerts, and track relevant edits.

As you can see here, with Visualping, you can select any element of any website, and the tool will alert you when any changes are made to that section.

When setting up your alert, make sure to select the bio area specifically, so that you're only notified when there’s a change there.  You'll also be notified when the user changes their profile picture unless you exclude that section from your alert.

It's a handy way to stay on top of relevant changes, which can help in maximizing your outreach approach.

Monitor Niche Questions

Getting referral traffic from Twitter is not necessarily easy because Twitter users like brevity and scrolling through the quick updates in the feed. As an active Twitter user, I can confirm that I often scroll headlines, though I seldom click on many links, as I can usually get the relevant context from the surrounding tweet conversation.

Yet, building high-quality clicks from Twitter is doable when you actively participate in related discussions.

I’ve been using this trick for my hobby site with some great success: Monitor your keyword on Twitter and add a question mark (after a space) to curate discussions that include questions on your target topic:

[keyword ?]

You can create this as a saved search in TweetDeck, run manual searches on Twitter or in various other social management apps.

This type of monitoring also enables you to better understand your customers’ struggles, and therefore better assist them - here’s an example of a tweet that came as a result of the question monitoring (and brought in a subscriber, too):

Worth noting too that there are platforms that automate this process by sending replies to tweets containing a certain keyword. I’d stay away from these solutions if I were you. I love marketing automation but only when it is used for the right reasons.

Keep an Eye on Competitors’ Unhappy Customers

Finally, if you want to know your target customer better, keep an eye on how they interact with your competitors.

• What annoys them most?
• Which product features are missing (and can your product fill that gap?)
• Is there anything on your side that needs to be fixed to avoid similar complaints from your clients.

Competitive monitoring can help you avoid bad situations where customers are so annoyed that they go public with their complaints. You can also learn from your competitors by watching them handle those complaints (or avoid their mistakes if they do that poorly).

Finally, you can also win unhappy customers over on your side by letting them know you have what your competitor is missing.

Twitter allows you to monitor tweets containing a :( so to watch your competitors’ unhappy customers, create a new search:

[brand name :(]

Using Tweetdeck, you can have both of the above searches set up on a single page:

Using the same logic, you can also monitor tweets containing positive sentiment around your brand to display them on your site as social proof. You can automatically update that social proof by adding these tweets on your site.

Conclusion

Twitter monitoring goes beyond a basic reputation management tactic - though that, too, should always be part of the brand monitoring strategy. You can connect to people in your niche and improve your outreach tactics by using the above, simple Twitter monitoring tricks.