One of the most important parts of a social media strategy is the listening part.  You need to know what people are saying about your company, your competitors and your industry – it’s also useful to find people asking questions you can answer, or are asking their Twitter followers to recommend someone who does the job you do.

Twitter has some fantastic search tools that lets you do this easily.

First, there’s the Twitter Search box:

Type a keyword in the box and hit enter – you’ll then get a list of tweets that include those keywords.

Then there’s the Advanced Twitter Search:

Type into the URL bar: http://search.twitter.com, which brings up this page:

Click on ‘Advanced Search’ (the small white writing under the white box) to bring up the Advanced Search page:

Using this box means you can search on a variety of terms: exact phrase, languages, hashtags, posts from specific people or posts from people in a certain location, you can even search posts that are positive or negative or a question.

And this is the best part – you don’t have to repeat the same search queries everytime you want to search Twitter.  Once you’ve searched either in the normal Twitter search box or used the advanced search tool you can save the search.  When your Results page comes up you’ll see the ‘Save this Search’ box at the top of the page – click on it.

Then, when you want to search on those keywords again click on the Search tab from your Twitter home page, select the search you want and you’ll see the automatically updated results for your search query.

Be proactive and make listening a part of your social media strategy today.

If you’d like more social media tips and info please go and ‘like’ my page on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/cloudva