5 Useful Twitter Search Tools
| Diane Vautier August 31, 2009 |
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Finding what you’re looking for on Twitter can sometimes be a challenge. With millions of tweets out there, how do you uncover what you’re looking for? How do you discover interesting people to follow? How do you track certain topics? How do you locate other Twitterers in your local area?
That’s where Twitter search tools come in. Search tools let you extract the interesting bits of information from the tweet stream without having to drown in a torrent of tweets.
Here’s a few of my favorites that help me find, track and monitor the key players and conversations on Twitter.
1. Monitter
This is a great tool to keep an eye on key words or people with the ability to target specific geographic areas. It lets you monitor up to 3 words or phrases all inside a geographic target. For instance Twitters talking about playing pool within a 10 mile radius of Nashua, NH. It’s excellent for taking a pulse of what’s going on in your company’s immediate sphere of concern.
2. Twitturly
Twitturly tracks the popularity of urls mentioned on Twitter. You can easily find the more interesting Twitter content by checking out the top 100 news posts, pics, videos, or the entire Tweetstream for that matter. You can even check out specific users and see what urls they share in their tweets, so if you follow someone who is particularly interesting, you can see exactly what url’s they’ve found to be interesting and have shared in their tweets.
3. Twitter Search
Of course if you know exactly what you’re looking for you don’t have to go any farther than Twitter itself. If you want to follow a particular hash tags like #pcb4 (Pod Camp Boston 4), find tweet activity around a specific user (@activeedgeteam), or get search results for a generic term (like “marketing”), the search function on Twitter finds exactly what you’re looking for.
4. Twubs and What the Hashtag
If you want to find out what people with similar interests are using to share information, Twubs helps you find common hashtag categories. Find people with similar interests as you by searching for topics by category group such as politics, sports or television. You can also expand your interests and learn more by finding popular hashtags and exploring the people that use them.
A similar hashtag type of tool is What the Hashtag. It lets you see the history of a particular hashtag along with the top Twitter users who contribute to its popularity. It breaks down the tweets into total contributors, tweets per day, number of retweets and other related stats. It’s a great way to research a topic, major contributors to the topic and time span of the topic.
5. Tweetgrid
Tweetgrid is my all time favorite Twitter search tool. It lets you search by pretty much anything with up to ten (10) window panes per screen. This multi-view search results combined with the loads of search criteria flexibility make it super versatile. Search by key word, multi-word phrases, hashtags, twitter user, geocoding or combinations of those. Boolean Operators such as AND, OR, NOT and advanced searches let you combine search criteria and even let you search to and from specific users or multiple users, and even tweets near a location. Whatever you want to know about, you can search on it.
Ok, so that was actually 6 Twitter tools. One is a bonus.
Everyone has their favorite Twitter applications that do exactly what they need to do online to help them better navigate the Twitterverse. There are hundreds of Twitter applications for countless functions. They are created, changed and updated on a daily basis, so keeping track can sometimes be a chore. The tools listed here are just a few of my current favorites that have helped me find my way. If you ask me what my favorites are six months from now, I may give you a different list. That’s the uncertainty and excitement of Social Media.
If you have favorites that you’d like us to mention please feel free to add a comment, tweet me at @dvautier, or email me at Diane@activeedge.com.
social media | Diane Vautier | 
3:47 pm
