A Tip For Tweeters – Subscribe to a Search RSS

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Just a quick one for all you  Twitter fans out there that like to follow what other people are saying about you…
twitter

Search for you

So, you’ve got your Replies section that neatly shows you all tweets that are directed at you starting “@SteveReynolds blah blah…”. Trouble is, sometimes people don’t reply with your username first, and sometimes people talk about you yet you have no idea because it just doesn’t track anywhere.

The secret is to do the following… Goto the (extremely hidden) Twitter Search page and type in your username, ie @SteveReynolds and run the search. You may find some surprising results! I know I certainly did – people asking me questions, or talking about my articles…

Of course, it also shows your replies from the replies section too, so you need to ignore any that start @YourUsername.

Subscribe

subscribeNext thing to do is subscribe to that search. The really cool thing about Twitter Search is its ability to create an RSS feed out of any search term. Therefore you can subscribe via RSS to your search and get updates sent to you as/when.

What Twitter Should Do…

Twitter need to think about this a lot. Ideally I don’t want to have to hunt around for this stuff in search. Either the Replies section needs changing to include these results and re-branded, OR a new section should be given to all users that revolves around “noise” related to you. In fact Twitter, call it Noise – that’s cool!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 and is filed under Social-Web, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “A Tip For Tweeters – Subscribe to a Search RSS”

  1. Matthew Leamy says:
    March 11, 2009 at 5:37 pm

    Good tip. This is very useful in apps that support the search API. I use TweetDeck which allows you to create search columns to monitor. No need for RSS.

    I use this for my work account which doesn’t follow anybody but I can still see and respond to tweets directed at it.

    Another trick in to search without the @ (SteveReynolds instead of @SteveReynolds) to include everything you’ve tweeted as well as @ responses. You can then feed the conversation over RSS, put a widget on your site, whatever.

    The search allows for OR. This allows all sorts of options (@SteveReynolds OR @chatterbloc) All the operators are here: http://search.twitter.com/operators
    My favorite is filter:links which only shows tweets with links in them.

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