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Yesterday, Twitter launched the Twitter Dashboard as a proprietary online tool. It’s a very exciting development coming from small, incremental updates in the many years that the social media platform has been asking. In their official blog post, Twitter promised that it would be an easy way for brands and businesses to create connections even when they’re time- and resource-constrained. Specifically, they claim to have “built a brand new app to help the busy people behind those kinds of businesses.”
So, the questions here are: why should you be excited and how can you maximize its use to your advantage? We walk you through our own experience of trying it all out. We then look reasons why Twitter Dashboard is a very exciting development.
Tweet offers and links to your landing pages to generate leads
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A Visual Guide to Setting it Up
When you first access dashboard.twitter.com or download the app from the App Store, you’re greeted by a clean and simple splash screen. Here a friend of mine tried it out with his personal account. But you can already see that it’s an easy enough process that any business or brand can readily get to using Twitter Dashboard with no problems.
Clicking on that helpful “Let’s Go” takes you to a screen where you get to select the category of your business. While that seems simple and intuitive enough, here’s a little guide to help you understand which one to select to maximize the benefits:
Local business: This category includes businesses and brands that are relevant to one geographical area from small towns to a city. These businesses have an actual physical store and their services cater to a more predominantly “offline” customer base. (ex. Local restaurants, convenience stores, shops)
Online business: Choose this if your business or brand primarily conducts it operations/services online. If you don’t have a physical store or presence and your customers need to visit a website or social media page to conduct business with you, this is your category. (ex. Online retailers, online loan providers)
Brand or product: Whether you have an actual store or a wholly online presence if you’re all about one specific product or a range of products within a limited set of parameters, this is the category you choose. (ex. Nike, Adidas, Apple, or any other businesses known more by their brand names)
Enterprises: This is your category if your business offers products and services that target other businesses. It’s easily the most unique and distinguishable category. (ex. Marketing companies, content aggregators, design firms)
A brief tutorial screen follows explaining the depth of the Twitter Dashboard: you learn that you can customize your feed to tag specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. You’re no longer limited to monitoring just mentions. You’re prompted to then input unique keywords that aren’t just relevant to your business, you can also include nicknames, people, and hashtags that you’ve found are important to you.
Let’s say you’re a company called Super Car Parts. The keywords you’ll want to put in will surely include the following: “cars”, “car parts”, “replacement parts”, “automobiles”, “rare parts”, and the like. With Twitter Dashboard, you can also include things like “Super Car Parts” (your name), “Supes” (your nickname), #thebestcarpartsshopever (your tagline). Best of all, they actually provide suggestions that are ranked based on their popularity as analyzed by Twitter.
More than that, they allow you to include exclusionary terms—or those that aren’t related to your business at all. For example, our fictional company Super Car Parts might not want to be associated with related terms like: “car accidents”, “death by cars”, “worst accidents”. All these negative key phrases are related to cars, just not something you want to have associated with you. Twitter Dashboard has you input them to help fine tune your feed.
That’s all there is to it! After you’ve done all of that, you’re taken to the main feed where you immediately see why all of this benefits any brand or business smart enough to take advantage of it.
1. The feed(s) are Now More Intuitive and Detailed
The first thing you’ll notice is that you feed is now divided into three sub-categories. The main feed is labeled “About You”. Apart from displaying anyone who has ever mentioned you, it also displays content relevant to the keywords that you put in during set up.
There are many advantages to this kind of set up. It allows you to see what people are saying about your brand or business even if they don’t directly mention you! This will provide unique insight into your brand or business’ standing among people and help you to react accordingly. It might even allow you to read off-the-cuff complaints or suggestions your customers might relay to their friends and family. This kind of knowledge will let you react to things at an almost instant pace.
Let’s say that someone was disappointed with Super Car Parts’ delivery delays and tweets the following:
“@myfriend Super Car Parts delivered so late! I am frustrated!”
Normally, because they didn’t mention you, you wouldn’t immediately see this, If you set up “Super Car Parts” as a relevant key name, this is going to show up under this feed, allowing you to respond appropriately. Maybe reaching out to that someone with an apology or a solution to his problem—either way, you come out ahead.
The other two feeds are pretty standard, with “Your Tweets” being an aggregated collection of everything you tweeted ever and “Timeline” being posts of anyone and any brand you’ve chosen to follow.
2. You Can Now Schedule Tweets:
Those who use Facebook will find it surprising that Twitter users are only now able to schedule tweets. Facebook has been allowing that for several update cycles now and it’s been infinitely useful in finely tuning the posting of content even in times beyond office or operating hours. This is especially relevant for brands or businesses that use Twitter for customer support. If you’re not yet doing that, you should! Your customers often leverage Twitter to reach out to you because the process is simpler and faster than on Facebook—which requires you to essentially travel to your Facebook page. After all, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to monitor your Twitter feed all night.
A business like our made-up Super Car Parts can schedule a “closing time” tweet with a reminder when they’ll be active again to send out at exactly the time that the business goes to rest for the night. This will properly set the expectations of your customers. This goes a long way to keeping them happy because they’ll be able to plan to reach out to you when they know you’re up and about.
Schedule tweets allow you to post content beyond office or operating hours
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If you rely a lot on consistent tweeting of content (stories, blog posts, images, etc), scheduling can also help lighten the load on your social media manager (or you, if you handle that yourself). You can get your content ready and scheduled up for a week ahead so you can focus on maybe generating the next batch of content you want to put out. This is especially useful if your analytics shows the specific days and times when your engagement is high (more especially if those times happen to be too late in the night or too early in the morning.
It’s a very useful feature, for sure. But unless you’re exclusively using Twitter, it’s somewhat limited because it’s just for this one platform. If you do like the feature, it’s a great preview of what you can do with larger social media management platforms that allow scheduling across all social media account –but in only one platform.
3. The Analytics are Concise and Simplified:
Lastly, are the analytics options. You start out with a general overview of the whole account and can choose from three timeframes (last week, last 30 days, last 60 days). Like any good analytics, you get an overview of your activity—your tweets, your media tweets specifically, and your replies. Twitter Dashboard presents these in simple figures and even gives helpful tips relevant to these three activities monitored. Beyond that, you can also monitor your audience, in terms of mentions and new followers, as well as you visits and views, in terms of profile visits and tweet impressions (or how often your tweets are exposed to readers).
You then have data on your tweets themselves, and this focus is invaluable in determining which types of content is proving the most successful in getting your brand out there and sharing your message. Arranged in the strength of impressions it makes, it will allow you to finely tune your content to represent those that are most relevant to your customers and truly help your brand and business grow and evolve.
Future Steps & Possibilities:
This is certainly a step in the right direction for Twitter as a platform. It acknowledges the utility and importance of metrics and data in finely tuning the social media marketing plans for businesses and brands big or small. Try it out, and if you find that it makes managing your social presence all that easier, I invite you to try out more comprehensive and all-encompassing platforms that provide the same useful functions but for ALL your social media presences in one easy to use a platform.
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