Many companies will have used a Twitter feed system to pick up brand mentions and respond to them if necessary and, in the main, this is a good and highly accessible starting point for Social Media Management. The next question you should ask is how much of your brand's content is Twitter based, how influential it is, and how it is being managed?
To answer the first part you can do a simple representative sample for your brand by comparing the volume of Tweets and Blog posts generated for your brand in one day.
As an example we compared Google Blog Search result volume with the number of Tweets generated for ‘Vauxhall’ on the 1st of May 2010. Vauxhall was chosen as it has not had any significant news or PR issues recently and therefore should represent fairly normal brand-mention volumes.
The results are as follows;
Google Blog Search: 2,479
Twitter Posts: 164
The result resoundingly shows that the volume of Blog posts for Vauxhall are significantly higher than Twitter; for which the majority of Tweets were second-hand car adverts. Just give it a try with your brand and see what sort of results you get, it only takes a few minutes.
Admittedly it’s a very simple test however, it does show that Twitter publications account for a relatively small slice of online publishing, and although Twitter does produce some viral spread due its social-network model; very often Tweets link to external content like blogs, forums, videos or news sites.
Although valuable in itself, Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg, and so if you really want to get involved you need to start talking to the wider online community. This could include engaging bloggers, using online PR techniques, talking to journalists and developing an official presence in key forums.
Because of Twitter's API that makes it easy to receive feeds of brand terms and reply to mentions, there are numerous well-marketed products that focus only on this sector. however, to effectively provide the same level of control and convenience for every key Blog, Forum or News site mentioning your brand is another kettle of fish altogether; and this is where the Repskan comes into its own.
Essentially the Repskan system is a bit like a Twitter aggregation tool but instead of only handling Twitter mentions of your brands it provides you with coverage for virtually everything on the public internet, whilst still providing the means for efficient response regardless of the site interface or format.
