'Birdwatching' in SMM: Monitoring Twitter

I had promised a post on monitoring Twitter and Facebook, in my last post. I have however decided to break it into two posts to keep it short and simple.

Twitter's growth is due to the power it holds in connecting people without much effort. Its simple as an SMS and the kind of virality it can ignite is tremendous. This has made it important for you to pay attention to what is being said about, you and your products, on this micro-blogging service. The product team at Twitter had the foresight to create an elaborate search mechanism for people to 'monitor' activity on Twitter.

On the footer you can click the Search link to use the official search engine. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the search as well. There is an option for Advanced Search which is clearly created to facilitate monitoring. The best part of this all is the Search Operators . These are phrases that if used as a search keyword act as short-cut to advance search. For example : you can search for "Rediff :(" to get results for tweets containing "Rediff" with a negative attitude.

There are other services like TweetBeep (http://www.tweetbeep.com) , Tweetscan(http://www.tweetscan.com/), Monitter (http://monitter.com/) also, that facilitate your SMM activity. Sideline(http://sideline.yahoo.com/) is another good tool that allows you to create a keyword group so that you can monitor more than one keywords in one go. BackTweets(http://backtweets.com/) can be used to monitor tweets with links to your site that are "hidden" inside of shortened URLs.

There is immense power that Social media has and services like Twitter can make or break a product or service if the owner does not Factor in SMM. A simple example in the attached screen shot explains that. If you look closely at the attached image you can see a link on the right navigation that says "Twitter these results".
It has become extremely easy to spread the word now..good or bad.. is just a matter of an emoticon ;-).


And as far as Ego Surfing on Twitter is concerned, Tweetdeck

gives you the option to see the tweets which mention your name, even if you maintain multiple personalities. My friend Rajeev, who uses Twitter extensively, is quite satisfied with Tweetdeck.

The Facebook post is coming up next. Happy 'birdwatching' to all.