To track the most important users in each language (and allow you to follow them) there is currently an app called twopcharts. It is easy to become distracted by the huge amount of data available to you when using Twitter, and so it helps a great deal to be able to visualize and focus on the information that you need. The following three apps are valuable for pinpointing, tracking and following on Twitter: Klout, TweetPivot, and Spezify. To monitor social media across Asian languages and markets there is actually a very interesting app called JamIQ:
To bring everything together into one place and visualize an overview of your marketing activities on Twitter there are several companies offering free or paid for social media dashboards and, again, I have looked at all of those currently available. My current picks for Twitter are Hootsuite for its impressive multilingual capabilities and the fact that you can have a free account, and MarketMeSuite, which has perhaps the best range of paid for services with, in particular, language targeting and the ability to set up reply campaigns. These last two features are going to become more and more important in the future. In particular, the ability to target.
Finally, once you have pinpointed and analysed your targets you can use one of the new services that tracks keywords and allows you to reply to, or break into, Twitter conversations with your own precisely targeted advertising tweet! TwitHawk is one paying example of this type of app (keywords: Target marketing on Twitter). Imagine, for example, if someone is searching for a particular product on the web, and, unable to find it through the search engines, they put out a tweet asking if anyone can help them. If your product fits their need and you have the ability to immediately respond to their message, you have a ready-made opportunity to gain a new client! This type of app, therefore, has the potential to be a very powerful marketing tool if used with caution and discretion.
It has to be said, from a multilingual web marketing viewpoint, an automated version of a targeted reply service coupled to, or incorporating, an automatic translation app would be a fascinating and perhaps formidable marketing tool. At the moment there is nothing like this. If there are any developers out there interested in, or capable of, making such a tool please let me know!
