todd m. sweet

Posts tagged Google Reader

One of the under-appreciated benefits of Twitter is an organization’s ability to track chatter about its brand, product, service etc. via a persistent search.  Unfortunately, Twitter’s search engine only goes back seven days, so you can’t rely on it to archive dated feedback.  What to do? Enter Google Reader.

Google Reader creates a searchable archive of all of your RSS feeds, not just the items you actually read, share or star.  Consequently, it is an excellent tool for archiving an incredibly large volume of data that can be curated at will using a variety of filters.  Here’s the process involved:

• Using Twitter’s advanced search, construct your query.
• On the results page find and click the “Feed for this query” link in the top right corner.
• This is the RSS feed for the search that you can now add to Google Reader.
• Rename it to something that is easy to understand, such as “Twitter - [Insert Keywords]”.
• Any new results will appear as a new item in the RSS feed.

I have a few searches set up that produce 100+ new items daily.  Because I don’t want or need to read every item on a daily basis I have placed these RSS feeds in a separate folder in Google Reader called “Archives”.  Every day I will highlight the folder and mark all items as read.  Even though they disappear from view I will always be able to search these items if need be.

Have you discovered any other techniques for tracking searches on Twitter?  I’d love to know.