6 Free Tools to Help You Find the Right Twitter Conversations

Twitter-ConversationsTwitter conversations, and social engagement in general, represent the ‘holy grail’ for all social media marketers that embrace the tool.

Luckily for us, as Twitter’s popularity has continued to grow, dozens of tools designed to help marketers become more adept at using Twitter as a marketing tool have sprung up. Of course, some tools are more useful for marketers than others.

Here are 6 of my favourite tools for finding the right conversations to engage in on Twitter.

1. Twitter’s Advanced Search

What better place to start than with Twitter itself? Twitter’s advanced search capabilities allow you to search by word(s) or phrases, people, places and even sentiment. These filters will allow you to quickly find conversations happening within your industry, identify subject matter experts, and connect with thought leaders.

Twitter-Advanced-Search

2. Hashtagify.me

If you’re looking for more information on specific keywords, hashtags and key influencers in your market, Hashtagify.me is a great place to start your search. In their own words, “Hashtagify.me allows you to search among Twitter hashtags and quickly find the best ones for your need based on their popularity, relationships, languages, influencers and other metrics.” Pay particular attention to the correlation between keywords for data-driven conversation topic suggestions.

Hashtagify.me

3. TweetReach

TweetReach, created by Union Metrics, is a fantastic way to measure the reach and exposure of conversations you may want to target. If you monitor a brand, track media events, run marketing campaigns, or hold contests and games on Twitter for your company or your clients, TweetReach is a simple way to measure the impact of your efforts. It’s also a great way to find influencers you can build relationships with.

TweetReach

4. Topsy

Providing “instant social insight”, Topsy is a social search engine that allows users to probe Twitter conversations to analyze trends and find the information and content that people care about. Don’t miss Topsy’s free analytics tool that will point you in the direction of content that may help you strike up a conversation.

Topsy

5. Social Mention

The real value of Social Mention is that it allows you to monitor any topic from across the web from an extensive range of social media platforms (after all, Twitter’s not the only place that those in your industry are conversing). Providing measures of strength, sentiment, passion, reach, and recommendations of top hashtags based on this information, Social Mention is a terrific compass to help you find social communities.

Social-Mention

6. Hootsuite

At Venture Accelerator Partners, we love Hootsuite. It’s easily the most used tool in our office every day. While you can certainly search out Twitter conversations with Hootsuite using its search capabilities, I find its main benefit to be its organizational capabilities. Once you’ve found the right Twitter conversations, use Hootsuite to create lists, track the performance of keywords and hashtags over time, and refine your strategy.

Hootsuite

Remember, once you find the right engagement opportunities, ease in slowly and earn the respect of those in the community by adding value to the conversations already taking place. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use social media for sales and marketing, check out our free whitepapers.

6 Free Tools to Help You Find the Right Twitter Conversations