Limiting your social media listening to Facebook is a mistake. Here’s why you should give Twitter a try.

You might think Facebook is the end-all-be-all in brand monitoring. But with tools offered by several companies, there are more reasons now than ever why you shouldn’t skimp on Twitter to understand what your market is saying.

One of the most important aspects of business, inside and outside of social media, is your brand’s reputation. If you can’t maintain an upstanding reputation, then the whole house of cards will fall.

True, there will always be haters. There will also always be brand ambassadors, if you know what you’re doing and are offering a great product or service. This is where social media listening comes in – monitoring what people are saying, good or bad, about your brand. You can do this through various marketing automation tools, or you can hire actual people to sift through the tons of human data flowing over onto Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and any other social platform out there.

Just remember – never limit your social listening to just Facebook. Yes, given the stats, it might be tempting to do that . But while Facebook boasts ~2,167,000,000 users, there are a total of ~3,595,000,000 on the next several most popular platforms (popular in the U.S.) combines. And given the recent issues regarding Facebook algorithms facilitating not only consumer advertising  but certain political agendas, many agree that it’s wise to diversify your social listening across various platforms to truly hear what is in the best interests of you and your clients, current and potential.

With tools out there like Narrow to grow your Twitter network, we explore why Twitter is a great alternative to Facebook to hone in on social listening.

It’s easy to engage consumers on Twitter

Facebook provides only a portion of consumer social data that is available for businesses to qualify potential leads, and it also has barriers and restrictions on consumer posts that limit the ability of automated engagement. Twitter, however, has none of these barriers, and a tool that Narrow offers even allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard.

“It’s very important to stay consistent with your frequency of posts and touch your clients as many times as possible to stay in the public eye,” says social media marketing and SEO expert Chris Labatte, who uses Narrow amongst other automation tools for Twitter listening. “You can use the tool for audience research or build your profile with the user insights analytics data. But the best part is the ease of automation – it’s one of the great ‘Set it and forget it!’ type social media tools”.

Twitter is better for a business-to-business audience.

This year, Facebook prioritised friends and family posts over business page posts, which has made it difficult for brands to reach people on Facebook via organic news feeds, but Twitter attracts a high-value business-to-business audience.

Shelby Rogers, content marketing strategist at solodev.com, says that Twitter allows for some of the most accurate input from social media listening.

“Twitter serves as an excellent platform for businesses to get as close to real-time response to their company as possible,” she says. “And Twitter engagements are often considerably shorter than those on Facebook. While social media marketers might have to pay closer attention to Twitter due to the fast nature of the feed, it’ll give them a better understanding of real feedback related to the product and also a faster recovery time.”

Twitter automation is about much more than saving time.

It’s true, automation tools are essential time savers when your workload becomes overwhelming. But a companies like Narrow and SentiOne are also invaluable when it comes to audience research, finding out where your brand is being mentioned and starting meaningful real-time conversations with potential clients and customers.

“Studies prove if you post your link or information once a day on twitter, it will get lost in the shuffle and even though you get some traffic, you will not get nearly as much traffic you would if you post that same content – modified just a bit each time – three to four times throughout the day,” says social media influencer and marketing strategist Laura Rike, who has used Twitter to grow her following to over 11.6k.

Good old-fashioned Twitter hasn’t changed much – and that’s a good thing for automated listening.

Founded in 2006, Twitter remains the most “old-fashioned” (in a good way) out of all the social media platforms, as it doesn’t have any fancy news feed algorithms, the tagging works perfectly every time, and a built-in analytics service provides all the data you might need in a downloadable format. But using outside automation tools within this already-great platform is definitely worth trying, because over the past 12 years, Twitter has become a very busy place. Automation tools allow you to see a big leap in your follower count and analyze specific hashtags –  something that Twitter itself doesn’t offer.

Twitter makes it OK to talk to strangers

Rick Springfield once warned a 1980s listening audience – “Don’t talk to strangers.” But the listening audience of today has to find ways to talk to – and hear – as many strangers as possible in order to survive and thrive in business. Twitter has stayed open to all sorts of uninhibited communication and listening, and automation tools like SentiOne allow you to directly listen to and monitor literally billions of discussions on thousands of web sources – places where people might be talking about you the most. With the use of targeted keywords, hashtags and locations, Narrow allows you to quickly identify your target audience on Twitter and attract relevant users to your profile.

Still Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

Remember, social listening automation, whether on Twitter, Facebook or other platforms, is great. And though you might want to listen to Rick Springfield more than your own audience, there’s still nothing like walking up to a stranger and saying hello – yourself.

“Too much automation can mean limited social media listening, and this is also a mistake,” says Gabby Green, social media manager for Jive Communications. “By sacrificing the human side of social engagement, you also sacrifice the trust of your audience and customers, as you can’t interact with them on a personal level. So while automation is essential, you still need to allow room for listening and a genuine human touch.”

Without the restrictions of Facebook, Twitter is too important to ignore to listen to your audience, especially in this day and age of so many different ways to automate. But don’t forget to inject your own personality with your own voice amongst the machines doing all the work for us.

Article written by: Ryan Kh