GigaOM » Collaboration

Twitter and Facebook Updates to Show in Search Engines — Are You Prepared?

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:00:59 +0000

Now that Bing and Google will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook, web workers will need to consider how much, and how publicly, we wish to interact with these two social networks.

Twitter

If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.

So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service.

Most of the people I’ve talked to compartmentalize their Twitter activities this way. Many of my WWD colleagues have several accounts, each of which focuses on a different aspect of their professional and personal interests. Third-party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, Brizzly, Nambu and Hootsuite, make it easy to manage more than one account.

Others, however, don’t like this approach. WWD writer Scott wants to see our personal lives — he states”Telling me in your bio that you don’t post personal tweets guarantees I’m not going to follow you back. Aren’t you interesting?” I certainly hope so, but I’m not sure that my clients want to hear me babbling on about the upcoming election in Seattle, or about how we need high-speed trains.

But now that my tweets will be included in search engines, having multiple Twitter accounts will make it possible to make one or more of them private, should I decide to do so. However you use Twitter, make sure that its privacy controls are set in a way that’s appropriate for your needs.

Facebook

I doubt that too many people will be upset by the addition of Twitter messages to Bing and Google, since Twitter’s own search and services such as OneRiot have been around for a while. Facebook searches may prove more controversial.

It’s likely that most people think of Facebook as a much more personal communication outlet than Twitter, since generally, people have Facebook’s privacy controls set to display content only to those they’ve “friended.” And as I wrote about this morning, one can even give different levels of access to certain people — my “personal friends” group can see more of my Facebook activities than my “business contacts” group can.

But I certainly hope that Facebook will give us a way of opting out of having our status messages show up in search engines. At this point, it’s unclear how Bing’s Facebook searches will work (they aren’t live yet). Google will reportedly take a personalized, opt-in approach, only showing status messages of your Facebook friends if both you and your friends tell Google which social networks you use.

It’s also not clear how Facebook Pages and Groups will be searched, although they are generally more public, and mostly used to encourage interaction with fans, or advocate for causes.

So in the coming weeks, web workers will want to evaluate how we balance our privacy against the marketing boost which might come from having our comments appear in Bing and Google searches.

Will you let search engines index your status updates?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

How to Monitor Real-Time Information on Twitter

Dawn Foster — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:00:09 +0000

In earlier posts, I provided some tips for improving your Twitter efficiency and mining Twitter for information. While both of these provide useful ways to utilize Twitter, you also need to be prepared to respond to other people quickly. Twitter is a short-attention-span medium, where tweets that are minutes old may already be obsolete. You don’t want to skip over any important information or miss the chance to respond. Here are my top three real-time monitoring tools for Twitter.

Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search

For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page. Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive.

My Favorite Real-time Twitter Monitoring Tool: TweetDeck

TweetDeck runs as a desktop application with Growl notifications that alert me when something important happens. You set up columns with all of your followers, groups of followers, @replies, direct messages, custom searches, trending topics and more. I have my TweetDeck set up with several custom searches that look for my name and organizations or projects with which I’m involved. These searches generate alerts whenever someone posts something new on Twitter that matches my search criteria. The searches are similar to what you would find on Twitter search, and you can use Twitter’s advanced search operators for more complex searches. The biggest limitation is that TweetDeck can only use 10 columns, so I occasionally find myself bumping up against the limit when I try to add another search column for a new project.

Browser-based Twitter Monitoring: Monitter

Monitter certainly looks better than many of the similar browser-based online monitoring applications for Twitter (TweetGrid, for example). It works much like Tweetdeck. You add a column for every search and can add complex searches using the Twitter advanced search operators. Monitter can also use more than 10 columns. I haven’t bumped up against the limit, but there might be an upper limit to the number of columns. The downside is that it seems to be a little slow to update, and at times I’ve had it freeze up, leaving me waiting for new information.

Regardless of which tool you select, make sure to take advantage of the advanced search operators that Twitter supports. There are some cool options, including negative/positive attitudes, posts with links, posts asking a question, and much more.

What are your favorite real-time monitoring tools for Twitter?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Try BackTweets for Better Twitter Link Search

Simon Mackie — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:00:09 +0000

Last week, Darrell Etherington wrote about how hard it is to measure the value of Twitter. One way to measure the impact that you’re having on the Twitter-sphere would be to see how many people link to your service, product or blog. Unfortunately, due to Twitter’s 140-character limit, most URLs are shortened using a service like TinyURL, is.gd or bit.ly, so if you search for a URL using Twitter Search, you’ll miss out on many of the links. This is where new service BackTweets can help. It works similarly to the standard Twitter Search – including Ajax notification of new results, so you can track mentions of your product or service in real-time — but, crucially, it dereferences shortened URLs so you won’t miss out on any mentions of your URL.

As an example, let’s try searching for “http://webworkerdaily.com” on Twitter Search and BackTweets. Twitter Search produces a rather paltry single page of results, with only one tweet from the last day.

Twitter Search for "http://webworkerdaily.com"

BackTweets, on the other hand, returns many more results, with two pages of tweets from the last day alone. It’s a much better tool for tracking mentions of a site on Twitter.

BackTweets search for "http://webworkerdaily.com"

What tools do you use for measuring impact in social media?

(via Daring Fireball)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Tracking Twitter by Topic: What's the Best Solution?

Eric Berlin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:08:47 +0000

Editor’s Note: With this post we welcome Eric Berlin to the WebWorkerDaily team. Eric is an award-winning web producer, writer, and entrepreneur who has managed and produced web sites and online communities for more than a decade.

Web working increasingly means having to read up-to-the-nanosecond trending topics and conversations across the social web, and on Twitter in particular. With the huge and growing number of Twitter apps and related services that are now available, it can be confusing to figure out the best way to quickly and easily extract those keyword-based threads that you need.

With that in mind, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land recently offered up a list of a number of different ways to track Twitter conversations based on keyword topics.

Sullivan’s specific mission was to find a way to aggregate tweets based on the keywords that he’s interested in and to import them directly into his Twitter profile’s stream.

With our SMX West search marketing conference happening this week, I wanted to keep track of the real-time buzz for SMX on Twitter. I knew how to do this manually by checking Twitter Search, but was there a way to have this flow into my regular Twitter stream, along with posts from people that I normally follow? Thanks to suggestions from people on Twitter, there was!

It is possible to do this, as it turns out, but it takes a little work. TweetDeck works well for tracking conversations based on search results via multiple panes, while Twhirl allows you to feed search terms directly into your Twitter stream by using the search box and “Activate” tool.

Twitterfeed is also mentioned as a potential solution as it allows you to import RSS feeds into a Twitter profile. Therefore, Sullivan’s mission is fulfilled in this way, as you can create a new Twitter profile, add RSS feeds based on Twitter search results (by grabbing the RSS feed from any Twitter Search results page) using Twitterfeed, and then follow that new Twitter profile using your main Twitter profile.

Personally, I’m not interested in inserting search results based on keywords directly into my Twitter stream because the “firehose” effect can overwhelm the ability to easily track multiple conversations and topics. And like Robert Scoble (who famously tracks quite a firehose of information already!), I’m “old school” in that, while I love TweetDeck and Twhirl, I mostly use Twitter on the web and simply refresh the page when I want to see the latest tweets in my stream.

I’m also a huge fan of RSS, so my favorite way to track conversations and trends that I’m interested in from the Twitterverse is to grab the RSS feed from search results on the Twitter Search site and simply add them to Google Reader. This way I can check in on topics I’m interested in anytime I like while handling my daily Twitter interactions separately.

Of course, Twitter is only one piece, albeit a significant one, of the larger social media picture. Increasingly, it’s important to track conversations across a variety of social media platforms. I like using Social Media Firehose, a Yahoo! Pipes mashup, for this. Simply type in the topics you’d like to search for, and an RSS feed is produced that captures “a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.” Social Media Firehose also lets you specify search by geographic location or by domains you’d like to filter out.

What’s your favorite method for tracking Twitter and social media topics?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.