Twitter (now X) continues to be a mouthpiece for businesses and brands. Its rapid-fire, no-holds-barred reputation allows its users to share anything and everything — and they don’t hold back. If you’re using Twitter social listening, you can capture the fine details of what people are saying on Twitter and use it to your advantage.
Social listening on Twitter gives you a front row seat to every conversation you care about. People post just about anything here, like real-time updates, opinions, breaking news, and other trending topics. Having these conversations all in one place makes it easy to keep your ear to the ground, especially if people are talking about your business.
Here’s how you can use Twitter’s real-time advantage to stay ahead of the curve.
Contents:
What Is X / Twitter Social Listening?
Why X / Twitter Social Listening Matters
Top Tools for X / Twitter Social Listening
Strategies for Effective X / Twitter Social Listening
Meltwater as a X / Twitter Social Listening Solution
What Is X / Twitter Social Listening?
Twitter social listening lets you monitor millions of conversations in real time on Twitter. Using social listening and analytics tools, you can set up searches for keywords, brand names, or phrases you care about, then get alerts whenever someone posts about those topics.
Twitter listening is one piece of the much bigger social listening puzzle. It’s specific to the Twitter platform, giving you insights into what Twitter users are discussing.
Since Twitter has a highly engaged user base, it’s worthwhile to see what’s trending here. You’ll need to tailor your social listening strategy to the platform’s format and audience to get the best read on conversations.
TIP: Download our free Definitive Guide to Social Listening for a deep-dive on the many benefits and use-cases of social listening solutions!
Why X / Twitter Social Listening Matters
Information moves faster than ever. A single post has the power to shape opinions and spark emotions and new ideas. If your business isn’t actively listening, you’re not just losing out on conversations — you’re missing signals that could define your next big opportunity or warn of an impending crisis.
Adding social listening on Twitter to your social media marketing can give you an advantage in this world of instant knowledge.
Here’s how.
Learn more about your customers
People feel comfortable sharing their real thoughts on social media platforms, especially Twitter. It contains a variety of thoughts and views (sometimes heated and controversial), brand mentions, humor, and influencer content.
Tapping into Twitter conversations can give you a fuller perspective of who your customers are and what makes them tick. You’ll gain raw and real expressions from your audience, even if their posts have nothing to do with your brand.
These honest posts can help you pinpoint your customers’ frustrations, desires, and needs, allowing you to adjust your products and positioning to meet their needs.
TIP: Check out our blog on the top Customer Intelligence platforms and tools to help you learn more about your audience and their unique needs.
Manage your brand reputation
If people were talking about your brand (and potentially spreading misinformation or negativity), you’d want to know about it. With Twitter being a place where users keep nothing sacred, it’s the prime place to air their feelings or vent frustrations.
Your brand might end up in their crosshairs, and Twitter listening can reveal when a comment or mention might hurt your reputation.
You can also use Twitter social listening to monitor your industry as a whole. For example, supplement companies might be impacted by new research studies on specific ingredients they use. Monitoring for these mentions can help them stay ahead of potential shifts in sentiments.
TIP: Don't miss our blog on the top brand monitoring tools to help you safeguard public sentiment towards your organization!
See what your competitors are up to
Social listening tools let you monitor your competitors as well as your own brand. Learn why other people are praising or complaining about competitors. You can use this knowledge to improve your own products or services, find where customers aren’t being properly served, and position yourself accordingly.
You might also get inspired by your competitors’ content. Track what they post and pay attention to how their customers respond to it (e.g., retweets, comments). This can give you an idea of what your audience might find appealing so you can create content that resonates with them.
Top Tools for X / Twitter Social Listening
Twitter social listening tools lets you automatically “listen” to conversations on Twitter without having to scroll through countless feeds. You can set up your social listening tools to look for specific keywords or phrases, then get alerts and reports when users post new content.
Here are five of the best social listening Twitter tools and how they can support your strategy.
1. Meltwater
Meltwater offers the most comprehensive social listening technology, monitoring billions of data points in real time. The platform works across all social media networks, including Twitter and other major platforms, to help you capture all of the mentions that matter to you.
Key features:
- Unlimited keywords
- Real-time alerts
- Sentiment analysis
- All social media channels
- Unified inbox
- Custom, automated reporting
- AI-powered insights
More important than seeing mentions is knowing what they mean. Meltwater uses consumer sentiment analysis and natural language processing to understand the context behind Twitter posts. This allows companies to know how to respond and engage authentically, which aligns with one of Twitter’s key strengths.
2. Radarr
Radarr by Genesys includes social listening as part of its brand management platform. Users can connect their social accounts, set up keywords, and start getting insights in a single feed. Radarr covers the most popular social media platforms, including Twitter, so you can get a better idea of your share of voice across channels.
Key features:
- Real-time social media monitoring
- Image analysis
- Brand reputation management
- Audience and campaign analysis
- Unified dashboard
- Topic clustering
The platform combines analysis, engagement, and content posting to help marketers simplify their work. You can get deeper insights into your owned media, respond to comments and DMs, and even plan and publish new content to your channels.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social offers a user-friendly interface to set up topic tracking. You don’t need experience with social listening or Boolean queries to start collecting insights. Users can keep tabs on everything from post engagement to customer feedback and sentiments from within the same tool.
Key features:
- Competitor analysis
- Event monitoring
- User-friendly interface
- Trend tracking
Sprout Social will provide alerts when someone mentions your keyword or when there’s a spike in mentions, which might indicate a brewing crisis or trend. It’s also a highly visual tool, allowing you to make sense of your data in different ways. For example, you can generate word clouds to spot your most popular keywords or mentions at a glance.
4. Keyhole
Keyhole by Muck Rack is a social media analytics tool that includes social listening as a feature. Like other social listening tools, Keyhole lets you select keywords and brand mentions to monitor across your channels. You can spot what’s trending, keep an eye on competitors, and learn more about the topics your audience cares about.
Keyhole also includes audience and sentiment analysis. Knowing the context behind mentions is key in crafting an appropriate response. Compared to other social listening tools, this one is a bit limited in terms of the networks it monitors. It currently supports Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, along with non-social media like blogs and forums.
5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo specializes in trending topic investigation. It excels in helping you develop content based on what’s already popular. You can tap into people’s conversations to know what to post and when to share it with your audience.
Key features:
- Brand alerts
- Media monitoring
- Content discovery
- Free trial
BuzzSumo isn’t specific to Twitter, but it does capture content and insights from the platform and other social networks. You can see what others are posting or saying about competitors, relevant products, or other trends and see how those mentions evolve over time. It’s also a handy tool for finding journalists or influencers in your niche who can help to amplify your voice.
Strategies for Effective X / Twitter Social Listening
It’s not just about the social listening tool you use, but also how you use it to get results. Twitter social listening tools often come with a learning curve and multiple ways you can use them.
Here are some helpful hints to get you started.
Set specific goals for Twitter listening
Twitter social listening can help you accomplish many things: monitoring competitors, improving brand reputation, shaping your content strategy, and finding new trends, for example. The key is to know what you’re looking for so you can spot those insights right away and act on them.
Be specific about what you want to accomplish with Twitter listening. This will help you track the right keywords and use the data you collect.
Use advanced filters to focus on relevant conversations
When you set up keywords to track on Twitter, you might get a tsunami of data telling you more than you need to know. Learn how to use your Twitter listening tool’s filter options so you can skip right to the important stuff.
For example, Meltwater lets you filter your data in different ways. Plus, you can get spelled-out insights to know what the data means. It’s like reading a report with the juiciest info upfront instead of relying on graphs and numbers alone.
Engage with users strategically and authentically
When the opportunity arises, be prepared to respond to comments and brand mentions. Engaging directly with your audience shows you’re paying attention, plus it helps clarify questions or comments.
Pay close attention to feedback or negative opinions. These can be opportunities to set the record straight and reposition your brand in a positive light.
Meltwater as a Twitter Social Listening Solution
For social listening, Meltwater provides a comprehensive solution in a single platform. Gain insights into your Twitter performance and monitor mentions that matter to your brand. You’ll get alerts when someone posts content about the keywords you’re tracking along with insights on why those posts might be worth a look.
Meltwater infuses social listening with end-to-end social media management, allowing you to run your content strategy seamlessly. Identify topics your audience cares about, create content on those topics, and schedule posts to go live at optimal times. Track your content’s performance, engage directly with your followers, and build up your brand image, all with AI-powered insights that make an impact.
Learn more about Meltwater for X / Twitter social listening when you request a demo by filling out the form below!
