Ever wonder what is being said about your small business on Twitter?  You might think that anytime someone mentions your small business in a tweet that Twitter would notify you.

That would certainly be nice, but unless they mention you by using @YourName, chances are that you will miss their comment.  In What Are People Saying Online About Your Small Business?, we discovered two underlying problems with trying to listen for comments about your small business on Twitter.

First, you can’t follow everyone so not all comments make it to your feed.  Second, the comments from those you do follow can easily get lost in the myriad of other comments in your feed.  The new lists feature helps this, but at the cost of the first problem.

To overcome both of these issues, it was suggested that we set up a listening post.  Okay, but how do we do that?

Using Twitter’s Built In Search Functions

Before we set up our listening post, let’s look at what Twitter already offers.  There’s no sense reinventing the wheel, so to speak.  Twitter has three primary functions that serve to help us find what we are looking for in a sea of tweets.

Twitter #Hashtags

Think of #hashtags as keywords inserted into a tweet to make it easier to find in a search.  Anyone can make, or post to, a #hashtag.  All that is required is putting a # at the beginning of the word.

If your keyword has more than one word you simply concatenate the two together.  One such #hashtag on Twitter is #FollowFriday where people recommend others to follow.

Twitter Search

To find tweets with these #hashtags, or any other words you want to find, you will need to use Twitter’s search feature.  While the #hashtags makes it possible to group like tweets together for easy following, it is not necessary to include them.

Chances are that your small business name is not going to be a #hashtag that people will follow, but you can still search for the name via this function to pull up any tweets that mention your small business.  If your company name is quite common then you will need to add other qualifiers to your search to narrow down the results.

Twitter Lists

This is a recently added feature.  It allows users to create their own lists that follow certain people based on whatever criteria they desire.  It’s useful to organize the people you follow into related channels so you do not miss their tweets.

Setting Up Your Twitter Listening Post

While you can save your searches and lists in Twitter for future use, they only work while you are online returning real time results.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to walk you through setting up a listening post using just Twitter’s built-in features.

Step #1: Decide What Your Search Terms Will Be

The first thing you need to do is decide on your search terms.  What exactly should your listening post be tuned to find?  Here are some suggestions:

• Your small business name
• Your own name
• The names of products/services you sell
• Your competitors
• Industry terms

Be as specific as possible, and think of variations – especially ways to shorten it since Twitter forces updates to be no more than 140 characters.  I have set up one for “The Christian Entrepreneur” and “Christian Entrepreneur.”

Step #2: Search Your Terms Using Twitter Search

When I first started using Twitter, I thought the little search box on my home page was Twitter Search.  It was not until later that I found out there is a more robust search feature at search.twitter.com.

The advanced search option gives you a lot of flexibility with how you perform your search.  For searches on your company name, make sure to use the This Exact Phrase box; otherwise, you will return tweets with any of the words in your company’s name.

Step #3: Subscribe to the RSS Feed of Your Search

Once you have performed the search, you will see an option to subscribe to your query’s feed in the upper right-hand corner.  This option will continue to periodically run your query and send the results to your favorite reader.

I use Google’s Reader for my RSS subscriptions, but you can choose whatever one you like best.  Now all that I have to do is open my reader to see what my listening posts have picked up. I don’t even have to be online for it to continue working.

Organizing Your Listening Posts

I organize all my listening post feeds into folders based on keywords.  This way I can quickly see what people are saying across the spectrum of networks by keyword.

As we continue the small business social media series, we will look at many other social networks and how to set up listening posts on them as well.  With just a few tweaks, the method above will work on just about any social media network.

Related posts:

1. What are People Saying Online About Your Small Business?
2. Who’s Really Listening to Your Tweets?
3. The #BlogEngage Community, How Tweet It Is!
4. Goodbye Digg, Hello Blog Engage!
5. Is Small Business Saying No Thanks to Social Media?