February 11, 2010

Twitter this. Twitter that. People talk about Twitter a lot. If you look at the most popular posts at OPEN, a lot of them are about Twitter. And yet, the real gold is in using Twitter Search. Let's talk about that.

Twitter Search is Your Friend

If you want to know where to find the gold, go to http://search.twitter.com. Start with the simple things. Type in your company name. Type in a product name. Type in your city name. Type in your competitor's name. See anything? What do you see? See any opportunities?

In the few years that I've been showing people this one little facet of social media, people always find something that raises an eyebrow, that leads to a distraction, that leads us off to pursue something that needs doing. If you didn't pause to try what I recommended, go ahead. I'll wait.

Twitter Search is how to understand and use Twitter.

Use a Smarter Twitter Client With Search

If you have the rights to load software on your machine, use something like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck to view Twitter. If you can't load software, check out Hootsuite or PeopleBrowsr. This is what the power users are using. Now, for the search part.

These apps all have the capacity to save searches. Put in a few of the searches you've tried that you want to keep tabs on. Note how you can leave a column with those search terms up and running all day. Pow: you've just lit up your own listening station for the Twitter channel. What can you do with that?

How Are People Using Twitter Search?

Hotels and restaurants are using it to find new guests. Software companies are using it to recommend products at the moment that a new customer might need them. Media companies are using it to find stories. Service providers are using it to help find new business. It's tax time in the US. Rest assured that the smarter tax services are using it to find new clients.

How can YOU use it?

This is Just One Tool in the Deck

But let's consider this a good place to start on understanding how to use these social networks for your business needs. We'll cover some other ways in forthcoming posts. Let me know if this rang any bells, and whether you need more.

Chris Brogan is co-author of the NYT/WSJ bestselling book, Trust Agents. He is president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at [chrisbrogan.com].

Join the conversation ( 14 )

• Shannon Paul 1 year 12 months and 16 days ago

  

  I tried Collecta.com based on the above recommendation from Tim McGuinness and I have to say I'm not very impressed. I'm always looking for real-time search tools and comparing them with one another. "Real-time" results were pulling in posts from a year ago intermingled with only a small percentage of items that were posted today. May be neat for a survey of recent(?) results, but I wouldn't count on it for keyword monitoring for business or reputation management.

• Nick Johnson 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  I've enjoyed using search.twitter although my particular business niche there are few instances in where I can maximize its use. I've learned that broadening my search terms pull better results.
  
  I can see the absolute value in certain brick and mortar business using it effectively and think more of them need to incorporate it.

• Justin Rasmussen 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  Great insight Chris, another way we dig deeper with twitter search is to initially search for broad terms we find important, grab the RSS feed from it then import it into Filtrbox (now owned by Jive Software). After importing we add additional terms and search criteria to find better relevance in results.
  
  Alternatively, you can use Yahoo Pipes, I did for a long time before switching to Filtrbox. Filtrbox has some cool features such as emailing results as they happen. I found this helpful when I've narrowed my search to maybe 20 or less important results per day. This makes for actionable search results rather than just a sea of data that needs filtering with every new item captured.
  
  You can also do roughly the same thing in Google Reader, import the feeds into a folder, then search in that folder for terms that are further relevant to your original search.
  
  Again, if you don't have a service, take the time to get geeky with Yahoo Pipes, it's one of the best tools currently out there to do massive import and filtering.

• Phil Simon 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  @Tim - thanks for Collecta. I checked it out and it's pretty neat.

• Ellie Becker 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  It's eye-opening to experience for the first time how powerful Twitter search is. I use a real-time demo in presentations on Social Media to help a participant discover an important audience already on Twitter waiting to be engaged. These 'Twitter Aha Moments' really help people get why it's worthwhile investing time there. My own came after a Friday afternoon tweet about spending the weekend on the back of a Harley. Within hours I was being followed by Harley orgs and enthusiasts. Aha!!

• JOHN JOYCE 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  I would also recommend www.cotweet.com as a great tool to centrally manage your Twitter activity, including search.

• Stuart Crawford 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  Chris, great ideas about Twitter search. I watch (using Hootsuite) things that are happy in our city (#YYC). This is a great way to keep up to date with what is happy in our community. What I am finding is Google Alerts are now sending alerts on mentions of our company and also Social Oomph.
  
  Other great tools.
  
  Cheers
  
  Stuart Crawford
  ULISTIC Inc.
  http://www.ulistic.com

• Paul Barron 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  I will write a post about this over at www.socialcococ.com

• Paul Barron 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  Twitter search though a reasonable tool, the real tool that I think offers great history and mention quality that is similar the to advanced tools with Google on keywords. The point for search is to actually get actionable data what that means for everyone is different but still the same result. I like the service called Topsy which is proving to be very interesting.
  
  I expect Twitter may be buying this company soon, if not then Facebook should get em to provide a whole new search tool for them.

• Cai Chen 1 year 12 months and 20 days ago

  

  Sorry, my mistake. The link doesn't work in my last comment. Here it's http://bit.ly/dd76Xl

• Cai Chen 1 year 12 months and 21 days ago

  

  Twitter's build-in search is good at freshness. Latest tweets are always on the top. Several third-party tools make twitter search even better. Perkpipe (http://www.perkpipe.com), for example, you can search most influential people and most relevant tweets. And Topsy is another one by the way.
  
  I just wrapped up an article, regarding twitter search and future directions. Have a look at: http://perkpipe.blogspot.com/2010/02/twitter-search-freshness-vs-relevance.html

• Jamie Ortiz 1 year 12 months and 21 days ago

  

  Thanks for the tip, Chris! I just used TweetDeck to reach out to a user who was iffy about checking out our MMORPG. The interaction enabled me to give her a promo code to redeem some free in-game items.

• Muhammad Siddique 1 year 12 months and 21 days ago

  

  I love twitter search. Tim thanks for sharing the new site.
  

• Tim McGuinness 1 year 12 months and 21 days ago

  

  The idea is right, but using Twitter search is always iffy. I found it better to one of the real-time search engines like Collecta.com (http://www.collecta.com/) because it brings in a more feed sources than just Twitter.