Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [66]
BLVDStatus displays these results in an attractive and easy-to-read set of widgets (colorful squares full of information you ask for, sorted how you wish to see it). The most interesting things about BLVDStatus is that it offers a free version that is valuable, offers real results you can customize, and is comparable to a larger, paid tracking company.
Twitter Search
Twitter’s own Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) allows you to figure out how people are interacting with you and what they’re saying about you on Twitter. You can track all mentions of your name, whether or not those mentions have an @ in front of them, by setting up a search and then bookmarking that search for later. If you leave the search tab open, its results automatically refresh every few moments. We have several bookmarked searches set up for our names, company names, and for any topics we are currently working on. You can also subscribe to the results of any search using RSS (see Chapters 4 and 8).
To set this kind of inclusive Twitter search:
1. Go to Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com).
2. In the search box, enter your search terms.
If you want to get fancy and you know how to use search strings, you can search terms like this:
-from:dummies dummies OR dummys, replacing “dummies” with the term for which you want to search.
3. Click the Search button.
Your search results appear. Figure 9-20 shows the results for the example Dummies search string.
4. Bookmark the search using your favorite bookmarking feature, program or Web site.
5. Repeat Steps 2 through 4 for as many search terms as you want to track.
Radian6
We recommend Radian6 (www.radian6.com), a paid monitoring service, for a large corporation that needs to track multiple campaigns on a national or international scale, or for a company that doesn’t have the manpower to set up and track multiple free searches on a variety of tools. Figure 9-21 shows the Radian6 Web site.
Radian6 offers some functionality that free search monitoring services don’t, such as tracking, graphs, analysis, and the ability to assign specific tweets to team members for followup. Radian6 offers the results in an easy-to-interpret, aesthetically pleasing, real-time package. It also offers superb real-time customer service, if you need assistance.
Figure 9-20: Twitter Search results for a Dummies string.
Figure 9-21: You can download Radian6 from its Web site.
Knowing Your Network with Follower and Following Tools
While your Twitter universe grows and grows, you probably want to find the best way possible to keep up with your followers and who you’re following. Twitter itself falls short in this area. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t offer a way to search your follower or following lists (which you can see in Figure 9-22). It also doesn’t offer a way to sort your followers alphabetically or navigate in any way more efficient than the slow page-by-page scan.
You can quickly find out whether someone is following you back by trying to send that user a direct message. If you’re on the Twitter Web interface’s DM update screen, that twitterer’s username appears in the drop-down list only if he follows you back. If you’re on a desktop client, you can try to direct message that user — if he doesn’t follow you, you get a message telling you so.
Figure 9-22: Twitter lets you see who’s following you (left) and whom you follow (right).
Networking is by far one of the most powerful uses that anyone can make of Twitter. But, finding interesting people, maintaining your network, and digging in to really understand who you are connected to are not always straightforward. Here are some tools that will improve your networking experience on Twitter:
Find your followers. You can use sites such as Twitter