With the millions of conversations being carried out on Twitter at any one time, cutting through the noise to find anything meaningful is a challenge.
Company bosses want to know what the return-on-investment of social media is and there are beginning to be some tools claiming to cut through the chatter to find what is relevant.
First a few figures - according to Canada-based LeadSift, there were more than 200m conversations about travel on Twitter in October. Admittedly, 99% of those amounted to nothing and less than 1% were social leads.
LeadSift analysed 969,000 social leads that were deemed to be relevant and timely with consumers who were ready to engage.
The company's technology tracks conversations to help businesses understand customer behaviour and where they are in the purchase cycle.
Via natural language processing, it claims to distinguish between male and female and age as well as being able to gauge the different buying stages of the consumer and filtering out the noise.
Some examples of the potential leads and the missed opportunity are provided below:
Further insight revealed by the company is that out of the relevant leads, only 1% of people got a response leaving missed opportunities of 959,474.
It also says people are more likely to be talking about their intent to travel on a Wednesday as opposed to the weekend and that those talking about travel also tend be interested in technology and entertainment.
The details are part of LeadSift's newly launched 'Missed Opportunity Index' - a free report unveiled across a number of industries including travel.
LeadSift CEO Tukan Das says it's about removing the pain around the time and effort dedicated to trying to find relevant results in Twitter.
It also draws on historical profile data and analyses more than 50 signal of human language to get to its insights.
NB: Conversations image via Shutterstock.