Twitter tip: How to find people to engage with on Twitter

Sep 5, 2010

Quick tip:

I have for a long time wanted to use boolean search on Twitter to find people to engage with. By this I mean using more advanced search functions to find people discussing my niche.

For instance, to find people talking about SEO on Twitter is simple. You can visit http://search.twitter.com and type SEO into the search bar to find people discussing that right now. But, what I want is to find people asking questions on the subject so that I can offer assistance.

Unfortunately, the search function on Twitter does not take the punctuation into account and will return the same results as the non punctuated query. Boolean logic states that if I surround the search string in inverted commas, I will get results for the exact phrase – question mark included – but it doesn’t work.

Solution:

Use a third party app to carry out the searches. One way of doing this is to use Hootsuite, a web app that offers an alternative – and a powerful one – to twitter.com.

After setting up an account, you can add a feed to your interface. This can be your home feed or a list or a saved search. When the feed appears in your Hootsuite interface, click on the upside-down triangle at top of the column and select “filter by” and select “keyword”, then simply type in the question mark and only tweets with question marks will appear - hence only people asking questions will show in the feed.

If it were my home feed, I would type in SEO? to see which of my contacts are asking questions about SEO. If it were my saved search for SEO, I would simply type in a question mark to find users in the wider twitter community asking questions about SEO. That’s my cue to join in!

Simple.

Tweet button for WordPress

Aug 14, 2010

If, like me you are using a WordPress plug-in for social bookmarking, it is time to check it’s suitability.

A majority of social actions on your blog/website will be either a Tweet or Facebook share. Many of the available plug-ins use the Tweetmeme button which can be inaccurate. Twitter has now released an official button for websites much along the lines of the recent Facebook Like button.

There are three plug-ins worth installing through the WordPress Dashboard, namely:

Original Tweet Button – Adds the button at the end of each post.
Original Tweet Button Shortcode – Adds the button wherever you add the shortcode in posts or pages.
Digg Digg – This is the plug-in I use. It has just been updated to use the official button instead of Tweetmeme.

There is another plug-in by Mohanjith which can be downloaded here. I haven’t tested it, but I know Mohanjith’s work and I trust it.

Now to go and find a plug-in for the Facebook like button.

How to delete all direct messages from Twitter automatically.

Feb 21, 2010

If you have many followers – or don’t keep up with your housekeeping – direct messages can build up in your inbox and it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Twitter provides a tool in the form of lists to help with your timeline, but offers no help with direct messages.
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