What Can Email Marketing Learn from Twitter?

The short answer is plenty. Once you filter out the noise and focus on what’s relevant, you can uncover treasure troves of information. When it comes to email marketing, we are always looking for the following:

• Hot issues in a market — these drive great newsletter articles.
• Problems that people are having — if you’re building an online business, monitoring the Twitter chatter will help you determine the articles to write, promotions to develop, and case studies to feature that address current problems in your market.
• Offers that resonate — discover which promotions are generating “buzz” and then consider how such concepts may work in your world.
• Lead generation opportunities — uncover prospects who are having challenges that you can solve; offer help and free information via your newsletter or blog.

Making sense of the voluminous Twitter feeds is not necessarily the hard part. There are so many tools out there—and more arriving every day—to help with analyzing the millions of tweets in a way that they’d be useful for you. Here are a few tools I’ve found:

• Tweet Volume — Enter up to three terms or phrases, and see the amount of Twitter volume that’s occurring around them.
• Twitter Search — Enter any terms and get a list of tweets meeting your search criteria.
• Trendistic — This provides you with a quick snapshot over various time periods for a term or phrase.
• TwittURLy — This is really neat one that shows you the top URLs recommended on Twitter over the last 24 hours.
• TweetStats — Check out the volume of tweets for any Twitter user or uncover recent trends.
• Twazzup — One of CNET’s top three tools; Twitter Search, plus a whole lot more.
• Collecta — Finally a tool that doesn’t start with a “T” and analyzes Twitter, plus other sites, as well.
• CrowdEye — Real-time search engine using Twitter’s “firehose” feed which provides filtering between tweets and links, sentiments, and more.

Play around with these. You’ll quickly discover how each can help in your quest to stay current, write about what’s hot, and ensure your readership gets the analysis, opinions, products, and more from you.

Do you have favorite Twitter tools not on this list? Please share them with us.