There are approximately 55 million Tweets sent per day on Twitter, that equates to 640 tweets per second!
It would take a lifetime to manually search Twitter for the tweets that may be of any interest or relevance to you. TweetDeck is a handy tool that can help you search for what you want and filter out what you don’t.
Whether you want to keep track of a trending news story, follow mentions of your brand, monitor conversation around your key words and services or even keep tabs on the competition, Tweetdeck is a great tool to do it.
To get started using TweetDeck head to www.tweetdeck.com and download TweetDeck for your desktop
Once Tweetdeck is installed, open it up and hit the ‘get started’ button. Please note, if you don’t currently have an active Twitter account you will have to create one at www.twitter.com (this shouldn’t take more than a few minutes)
At the welcome page, add your Twitter account by clicking ‘add twitter’. Enter your login details and hit ‘submit’. The next window will ask you if you want to register your Tweetdeck account – you can skip this step for now.
You should now have Tweetdeck open infront of you complete with a few default columns, these will include ‘all friends’ ‘mentions’ and direct ‘messages’ – keep these open as they are useful for monitoring your account.
There will also be two more columns, ‘trending worldwide’ and ‘TweetDeck recommends’ – These aren’t so important so can be deleted. To do this, hover over the ‘t’ Twitter logo located at the top right of the column and hit the ‘x’:
Now we can set up some search columns. To do this click the add column button at the top of the page:
Lets say for example, we want to follow conversations about the new search engine, Blekko. Simply key in ‘Blekko’ and hit ‘Search’:
We will now have a column that displays a feed of all tweets containing the word ‘Blekko’:
If you wish to search for more than one keyword, use the following parameters:
- AND will search for both search terms (or more if used)
- OR will for either one or the other search term (or terms)
- Use ‘quotes’ to search for a specific search phrase
Please note: When using AND or OR they must be used in CAPS.
If you find that a certain search term is churning up a lot of spam or irrelivant tweets, you can delete the column in the same way we did before. Alternatively, you can edit the search from within the column. To do this, hover your cursor over the top of the column and click ‘edit’, enter your required search and hit save:
If you don’t have the time to monitor all your search results, TweetDeck has a notification system that will alert you everytime a relevant search term appears. To set up notifications, click the ‘settings’ button, located in the top-right corner of TweetDeck and click ‘notifications’ from the menu
Click ‘Advanced options for columns’ and using the tick boxes, select what columns you want alerts for. On this page you can also select where you want the notification to appear on your desktop, how much information you want to see in the ‘pop up’ and whether you want it to make a sound or not. We suggest setting up notifications for only the most important of your search columns as eventually, beeps and pop-up messages can become a little distracting.
TweetDeck can look a little confusing at first, but once you start to explore and make sense of it, it can be a very useful search tool.
For any questions about using TweetDeck please contact us.
