While it’s important to pen great tweets, it’s equally (and some would say more) important to listen well on Twitter. Your homework for this weekend is to brainstorm a list of keywords that you can use to monitor conversations happening on Twitter that are relevant to you, your brand, or your interests.

As with anything, you’ll find more success with Twitter if you approach it methodically. Organizing your Twitter monitoring schedule is one way to both minimize the idle time you spend on the network, and improve your listening ability. And it all starts with the conversations you want to follow.

I recommend starting with 5 to 10 keywords that are especially relevant to your reason for being on Twitter. If you’re a political news junkie, consider keywords like “breaking news”, “presidential campaign” and “#POTUS”. If you’re a social media manager, you might want to include keywords like “social media”, “Facebook ads”, and “Twitter” in your keyword list.

Keywords can be anything – a string of words, a hashtag, and even a Twitter user that is relevant to your niche.

Keep this list of 5 to 10 keywords handy. And don’t be afraid to add or remove some keywords if you need to. This should be a flexible and fluid list that tracks to the major conversations happening in your area of interest on Twitter.

Next week’s homework will be to start monitoring these keywords. I’ll go over the basics of Twitter’s advanced search and how you can keep tabs on what’s being tweeted about in your niche.

If you do complete this week’s homework, feel free to share some of the keywords you’ll be monitoring here in the comments or let us know on Twitter @alltwtr!