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How To Track Twitter Conversations

by Tim Elliott on September 9, 2008

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

As I start wineries on the social media path, one of the most common questions is how to use Twitter. It’s probably because the micro-blogging service is sort of like a lot of things that came before — blogs, instant messaging, SMS, social networks — but how it’s being used is not like anything that came before. Since Twitter has a bare-bones feature set, there is not an easy way to track ongoing conversations in the standard web interface.

But Twitter’s secret sauce is it’s API which gives outside developers access into the service and provides a way for new and interesting applications to be built. One of the most useful of these applications is Quotably which adds discussion threads to Twitter conversations. So when you come into the middle of a conversation and can’t figure out that is going on, just put the Twitter address into Quotably and these threads will be generated.

But organization can also be a good tool to understand Twitter discussions. Enter TweetDeck, another Twitter API application that gives the user the tools to organize all those tweets into something that makes sense. For example, you could have a column for wine bloggers, another for customers and a third for real world friends. I also recommend you add the replies view as this is probably the easiest way to interact with a Twitter conversation.

Another good tool is the search feature now built into Twitter. This began life as a 3rd party application called Summize but was recently acquired and integrated into Twitter. The ability to search by keyword (winery name or variety, for example) makes it easy to find people posting about your wines or winery. Another search tool is Monitter which gives you the ability to organize keywords into columns the way TweetDeck organizes Twitter friends. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds from Monitter which provides another good way to listen to what people are saying about your wine brand.

Whatever tools used, remember that we are just making up the rules of Twitter right now. So experiment and have some fun!