I love Twitter, and I find it uniquely suited to help journalists create a community, reach their readers and find out what’s buzzing. Here are some tools I use regularly to help me use Twitter to the best advantage.
This is a short list. There are many, many other Twitter tools. If someone finds one useful that I haven’t mentioned, please share and explain how you use it.
These are my favorite Twitter-related tools:
search.twitter.com: Basically, it’s a tool to search the Twitterverse. I find often it works better than doing a Google search because it gives you results of what’s happening now — not results of recent stories or blog posts.
Here’s how I use it:
- Search by Twitter name. I search by my Twitter name, bloggingmom67, almost daily to see if people have responded to my tweets (so I can answer back) or retweeted my tweets, so I can thank them. This builds your engagement in Twitter. (You can also search by other people’s names to see what they are tweeting or retweeting.
- Search for a topic. If I’m blogging about the single mom in California who recently had octuplets, I can use the search function to find what other bloggers are saying about her. Google searches tend to turn up news sites first, not blogs. Twitter often turns up blogs, first. As I’ve mentioned before, linking to other blogs in your niche can help build your community of readers and increase the chance other bloggers will link to you — which ups your value in the eyes of Google. I also use this feature to see what topics are getting a buzz.
- Search for city or town where you live or work. This is something I do only occasionally to see what people are saying about my community. It could lead to story/blog post ideas or tips on people to follow.
- Check trending topics: This application gives a list of what topics are popular on Twitter at that very moment, which can be useful. And it includes hashtags that are trending. Hashtags are a pound sign before a word; people use it to aggregate all the tweets on a subject in one page. #cny, for example, aggregates all the tweets about Central New York, where I live, on a page that people can follow. If you’re looking for tweets on a particular hashtag, such as #inaug09, you can plug it into this application and find what people are saying.
Twittergrader.com: There’s more to this than just a grade.
Here’s how I use it:
- Get your grade: OK, I’m kind of very competitive, so I like knowing my grade. You plug in your Twitter name and get a grade, based on the number of followers you have, the power of this network, the pace of your updates and the completeness of your profile. It’s intended to measure your power in the Twitterverse. Best is 100 percent. It’s fun to see your number go up.
- Find followers: The best part of Twitter.grader is it recommends followers to you. If you grade yourself once a month and follow even a quarter of the folks Twitter grader tells you to follow, you’ll increase your power in the Twitterverse rather quickly.
- Find people to follow in your community: Instead of plugging in your Twitter name, use the search function and type in the name of your town/city. You’ll find out your reach in that community, and get some valuable suggestions of local folks to follow.
Retweet Rank: Retweeting is when one person copies what someone else tweets and tweets it again, usually crediting the original tweet. (The format is: RT: @bloggingmom67 means someone is retweeting my tweet.)
Here’s how I use this tool:
- Find people to follow: This tool give a list of the ever-changing top 10 people whose tweets get retweeted the most. These are good people to follow because they have a lot of credibility in the twitterverse. Plus, if they retweet the blog post link you tweeted, you’re going to get a rush of traffic, because people listen to them. (It has happened to me, and it’s pretty darn amazing.)
- Find own rank: This is more in the category of interesting, not necessary. But it’s good to know your rank if your goal is to increase it. If people regularly retweet your tweeted blog links, you get more bang for your buck on Twitter.
Twitscoop: This application gives you the scoop on what’s hot on Twitter at that very moment. (It’s similar to search.twitter.com, but it pulls up different stuff on occasion, so I find it useful to check both.)
Here’s how I use this tool:
- Check what’s buzzing: You can type in a topic or keyword to see what people are saying about it. Up will pop tweets on the subject, but the coolest part is you’ll get a graph showing how the tweets on the topic are increasing or decreasing over the past six hours. It’s helpful because if you’re blogging on that topic, you want to hit it when it’s hot.
– Gina
