This is a guest post by Aaron Hockley. He is the publisher of Social Photo Talk, a website exploring social media tips, information, and resources with a focus on how they can benefit photographers and the photography industry. Learn more about Aaron or follow him on Twitter.
It’s easy to use Twitter to post messages and keep in touch with those you are following, but one can gather a lot of business intelligence by using Twitter’s search features to gather information. You might be asking yourself, “What should I be searching for?”
The possibilities are endless, but here are some things that might help you out: your business name, your competitor’s business name, the name of events you’re attending, the name of your industry, services you provide, or the city you live in. There are a few ways to use Twitter’s search features; let’s take a look at three basic methods of use.
Searching via the Web
Head over to search.twitter.com and enter your search term. You’ll see a list of results, and if you stay on the website you’ll be prompted to refresh as new tweets arrive that match your term. If you’re monitoring something in realtime and don’t want to bother with setting up a client, you can use the Twitter web interface from any computer and watch the results flow by.
Pro tip: Want to be a Twitter search genius? Be sure to learn the full set of Twitter search operators.
Searching with a Client
Many people use desktop clients such as TweetDeck, Tweetie, or Seesmic Desktop to interface with Twitter. Most of the clients allow for a search to be saved and then redisplayed.
For example, you could search for your business name to see what is being said about you and then save that search so that at any point you can see what folks are saying. Exact instructions on how to set it up will vary depending on your particular Twitter client, but all of the major players offer search of some sort.
Searching via RSS
While the web and client searches are great for realtime results, sometimes there might be a term that you want to monitor long term. Perhaps you want to know every time that your business name is mentioned. Maybe you want to setup a feed for your industry and location (if you’re a florist in Seattle, you might want to know everyone talks about florists in Seattle).
You can setup such a monitoring system using an RSS feed with your favorite RSS reader. Go to the Twitter search web interface and create your search query. After you submit the query and are viewing the results, click the “Feed for this query” link in the upper right to get the RSS feed for the search. Put that feed into Google Reader or another feed aggregator, and you’ll know every time that your term is mentioned on Twitter.
Twitter’s search features can provide a great insight to your world, as well as make you aware of opportunities for potential clients or peer networking. Learn to use the Twitter search features and become a conversation-monitoring ninja.
Image by JoshSemans
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