Try BackTweets for Better Twitter Link Search

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)

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