One of the problems with using Twitter for business is the low signal-to-noise ratio, a term indicating the ratio between useful information (good tweets) and background noise (twitter fluff). Twitter is of course a social network it is not a business communications channel and the fact that someone is eating peanut butter may be a socially redeeming bit of data for someone else, but with a little bit of work Twitter can also be useful for determining trends and even for competitive analysis.
The way most Twitter users begin is to look around for folks to “follow” and thereby get updates to their Twitter clients when the “followed” post an update (tweet). It is also useful to follow some of the “A” list Twitter users (the ones with several thousand followers) because they tend to be in front of trends due to their visibility. This does not mean that they make the trends necessarily just that due to the large amount of followers some of the key “A” list folks tend to hear about and broadcast “tweet” or “retweet” news and links early. Unfortunately following the “A” listers is generally a frustrating process. Except for a few names, many of the “A” listers have few people that they in turn follow so most of their public posts end up looking like only one-side of a conversation when they do bother to reply or they become a series of self-promotional messages and links. So what do you do? In general, the hidden Twitter “secret” to getting value from the “A” listers, that they probably don’t want you to know is that you get the most Twitter value from not actually following them.
Follow without following
So how does this work in practice? There are services like “twitscoop” that tell you what’s “hot” on Twitter or “tweetgrid” that let you set up a search grid to filter keywords in real-time. The problem with these services is that they are real-time and require “eyeballs on the screen”. If you are actually trying to do real work then this is extremely non-productive. Twitter itself provides a excellent solution – They provide an RSS feed:
1. Create a twitter feed
Simply go to the Twitter user that you are interested in following e.g. http://Twitter.com/digitalbeat and scroll to the bottom of the profile page until you see the link on the left that says RSS. The RSS link will then be something like http://Twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15472392.rss (in the case of DigitalBeat). You can then put this link into your favorite RSS reader or even directly into some email clients (Gmail and Outlook for example). But wait there’s more!
Making RSS useful
Having a steady stream of raw RSS tweets is okay but not really much of an improvement over the standard Twitter client displaying tweet history whenever you connect to Twitter. What you really want to do is to filter the raw stream into consumable portions. To do this you want to use an RSS feed aggregator that allows filtering. I have been using Aide-RSS which is now called Postrank (http://Postrank.com). With Postrank you can create a Twitter feed for any twitter id that you would normally have followed.
2 Choose tags and type of posts to read
When you create the feed you can tell Postrank to give you all posts (tweets) or to use their post ranking algorithm to give you only the best posts, the great posts or only the good posts. This saves you the time and effort of developing your own keyword filters. Postrank works well and if you choose say “great posts” even the most voracious “A” list updater gets cut down to only the one or two “great posts” that they produce each period.
If you are using Postrank then when you create the feed you should also define one or more tags for the feed. In my case I use a tag called Twitterfollow to separate Twitter feeds from other RSS feeds that I subscribe to. You can then create a channel for one or more tags so my TwitterBusiness channel has all of my Twitter follows that are business oriented my TwitterTech channel has the technology related follows etc. Finally, you can subscribe to your newly created, filtered, Twitter-follow, Postrank channel in your favorite RSS or email client or even pull it directly into your own market research database. You can of course just view any Postrank channel or tag that you have created, directly in your web browser.
3_Create the channel subscribe and share
So that’s it you get to follow the “A” list crowd without messing up your real time Twitter feed with dozens or hundreds of mundane tweets. Is there a downside? You are not getting these in “real time” there’s probably a 30-60 minute feed delay (but you are working right) and the “A” list twitters may lose some (direct) followers but they’re probably not going to lose any sleep over this so why should you?
In closing, I am starting to play around with another site http://feedrinse.com that lets you do your own filtering with keywords which is something that I find difficult to do with Postrank. In fact I find filtering the Postrank output feed through feedrinse may be the best of both worlds. I can then apply post filters to remove posts with things like “://adjix” links or references to “://alltop” or “fuzzy slippers”. I also find it useful to RSS subscribe to the Twitter public timeline and to filter for posts that contain certain keywords which is great for data mining and competitive analysis but that’s for another post if you’re interested.
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