Twitter for research

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 10:49 am

Twitter can also be a great research tool. You can use the search at http://search.twitter.com to find the latest tweets on any topic you wish.

This can be a great way to keep track of new things happening on any topic. Each search has a feed that you can add to your favorite feed reader and automatically see all the new things happening on Twitter for that topic.

You should be following your name, any product names you have to keep track of what is being said. Yes if someone replies using @mikepaetzold it will show on my Twitter but if someone just uses my name Mike Paetzold in a tweet it won’t show up unless I am following them.

Always nice to know when someone is saying something good and even more important to know if it is bad.

Now lets apply this tool to blogging. Isn’t one of the hardest things to come up with topics that are of interest to your audience. You can get ideas and questions just from following the latest tweets on your topic.

Writers block usually disappears for me once I have a topic and this can be a great way to generate those ideas.

Tweet Later is another tool that will allow you to monitor your keywords but it will email you the results on a schedule that you set. The easiest way to describe it is as Google Alerts for Twitter. (By the way Google Alerts is something else you should be using.)

Now Tweet Later can do a lot more like auto following, allow you to schedule tweets for when you are away and send automatic welcome message for new followers too. But our topic is research and knowing what is happening in your niche makes staying current easier.

Depending on how you like information delivered either of these tools can be very helpful for keeping abreast of what is new on Twitter for your topic.

Feel free to let me know if you have found other tools to help do these things as this is an extremely fluid market place with Twitter tools.

Mike Paetzold