Three Tools to Help Shape Your Twitter Strategy

More so than any other social media platform, Twitter is designed to inform and spread breaking news. Businesses can use Twitter to share information on services, gather real-time market intelligence, and build relationships with customers, partners, and influencers.

Here are three essential tools to help start and guide your Twitter strategy.

Keyhole
Keyhole.co provides you with real-time tracking of hashtags, keywords, and URLs. This is especially useful for tracking conversations around a conference, or major company announcement like a product launch or funding announcement. Reports are easy to digest and break down trends by demographic, region, key influencers, and more. See some example screenshots below tracking for #BackToTheFuture.

You can also purchase historical data through Keyhole to gain insight on how topics trended in the past.

Twitter Analytics
Twitter has a complementary built-in analytics dashboard that can help you learn more about your audience and how tweets are resonating. The information provided can get quite granular – audience interests, audience gender, individual clicks on a hashtag within a tweet, impressions on a tweet, growth in overall Twitter followers, engagement rates, etc. Analytics are also available per an individual tweet, as you can see below.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a free social media management tool that offers everything from queuing to analytics. While there are more advanced paid plans available that offer features such as custom URLs and enhanced reporting, for a company just beginning to lay the framework for its social media strategy the free plan works just fine.

One of the most valuable features offered in Hootsuite is the ability to queue content in advance. This allows you to guarantee a steady stream of content throughout the week that is targeted to peak user hours without you needing to draft and schedule the content in real-time. As you can see in the example below, content can be scheduled far in advance, and across multiple social media platforms.