Content Marketing Today

How to Set Up Your Vital Online Listening Post

Use TweetGrid to monitor what’s being said about you, your company, your customers, and your competition.

Your business does not exist in a vacuum.  Quite the contrary.  Your success depends upon how well you satisfy the most important needs of your customers.  Their level of satisfaction will be relative to what your competition is doing and what other customers are saying about you to their friends.  If you fail to monitor those external elements, only good luck will rescue you from disaster.

That’s where Twitter and TweetGrid come in. 

Simply put, Twitter consists of a universe of 140 character messages in cyberspace communicated amongst members who are sharing their thoughts about a zillion different topics and interests. These messages are delivered as soon as they are sent.  Therefore, if you are logged in to Twitter, you will receive them instantly. 

In the past year, Twitter has grown at a phenomenal rate to become both a social and a business tool. Although there is plenty to say about Twitter, we will examine only its usefulness as a source of feedback to help you understand what’s going on among people and organizations that are critical to your success. Thus, Southwest Airlines was able to monitor a tweet complaining about ticket counter customer service in real-time.  They actually responded to solve the problem before the customer had left the counter.

Use TweetGrid to capture real-time information that could be critical to your company.

TweetGrid is an online, browser-based Twitter search tool that lets you observe up to nine streams of Twitter posts (called tweets) on any search phrase you choose.  These tweets are structured in a grid that can be up to 3 x 3 and come at you in real time.  You can then save each grid as its own URL so that you can monitor an unlimited set of tweets about you, your company, your products, and your competition.

Here’s an example using major retail department stores.  The image was captured at 8:30 a.m. on January 23, 2009.  But you can go to see the live TweetGrid at the following URL: http://is.gd/gX46

Thus, you do not have to be an active tweeter to put Twitter to good use for your organization.   Simply monitoring what’s going on in the Twitterverse that might impact your company empowers you to respond swiftly to your customers’ needs and your competitions’ activities. 

By the way, it’s worth noting that TweetGrid is the creation of a young entrepreneur who goes by the Twitter handle of jazzychad. I’m delighted to know bootstrap software creation is alive and well and helping to drive the growth of social media marketing.