Category: Social Web

Last week I spoke at the Ignite in Rome (Italy). My presentation was in Italian but on this post you’ll find all the notes related to each slide (below) in English.

Learn how to use Google to take Twitter search to a whole new level. Enjoy!

Andrea

NOTES:

1. Intro about me and itive.net
2. Every time you go to an event it’s nice to take something back home. Something practical to play around with and experiment. So in my presentation I wanted to give more practical tips then just theory.
3. Passive VS Active use of social media. Many people use social media in a passive way. They just use the standard features but they don’t use the tools at full and they don’t even combine them with others to get the best out of them. In this presentation we’ll do exactly this: Combining twitter with Google to get the best out of it.
4. Challenge: Find stuff that matters. This is an open challenge for many communicators. When we are searching for something we look for information that can help us in better achieving our objectives. Searching junk that doesn’t apply to our aims.
5. So from where we can start our search? Well social media/networks are a good starting point. According to Nielsen consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year. In this presentation we have a closer look at Twitter.
6. So where do we start to search something on twitter? We start from http://search.twitter.com.
7. Let’s say that I have a client, a restaurant for which we are conducting a competitive analysis. Among other strategic moves & tactics we want to search on twitter for potential competitors that we can examine and study. So we are looking for other restaurants on twitter that are located nearby our client. By typing and searching for ‘restaurant’ we’ll get thousands of results of tweets that contain the word ‘restaurant’ but that are not necessarily tweeted by restaurants.
8. We need something more accurate. If we have a look at the advanced twitter search we can use multiple search terms, a specific location etc. but it’s still something that doesn’t help us much in narrowing down our results to only restaurants in that area.
9. What we noticed with my team at itive is that the best result we can get at this level are the one that contain links. In fact when people share valuable information online they usually do it with a link to add more value to what they are sharing.
10. What the advanced twitter search doesn’t offer (yet) is the possibility to search for multimedia content. For example videos and photos. This data can be really useful at times in our searches (keeping in mind that you might want to use these tips I’m giving also for other searches and not just for restaurants). Twitter is full of photos, but do we find them?
11. It’s simple. You’ll just need to add to your search term some of the services that people use to share photos on twitter (like twitpic, etc.). Here’s what you need to type: restaurant twitpic OR ow.ly.
12. But let’s try to use these channels in an active way. As you probably now recently Google started to index tweets in its search results. We can use this as an advantage that can help us achieve better results for what we are looking for. We’ll use Google to search Twitter.
13. We can start by searching twitter profiles that have in the name/title the word ‘restaurant’. We’ll do it by using intitle:”restaurant* on twitter” site:twitter.com in our search. Interesting isn’t it?! 😉
14. Yes but what is the this twitter profile (in my slide I used my own to not share the one of any restaurant -privacy) has the word ‘restaurant’ in their Bio instead of in their name/title. Example: The name could be ‘Delicious Food’ and the bio description could be ‘We are an Italian restaurant etc…’. How to we search our relevant info in the bio?
15. we’ll simply need to change the attribute in our search with this: intext:”bio * restaurant” site:twitter.com. Keep in mind that we would have found any of these restaurants by using the previous ‘title search’. At this point our research is starting to give us better results but we still need to focus on our location.
16. Location is very important. But once again the search we perform on the basic advanced search of twitter just gives us ‘general’ results. (to get these results we specified the location in from the advanced twitter search page). What we can do is something smarter…check the next point.
17. A this point we can combine the two previous searches (title, bio) and add on top of those a third attribute, the location. So we’ll search for twitter profiles of restaurants (whether is specified in their title or bio) that are in New York City (I chose NYC as an example you can enter any other location/area/state/city). Here’s what we’ll nee to type: (intitle:”restaurant * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * restaurant”) intext:”location * NYC” site:twitter.com. The results are exactly what we were looking for 🙂
18. Remember that this is nothing without a strategic communications plan. This tips are at tactical level, not strategic.
19. Tactics like this can help us in monitoring trends, analyzing competitors and of course in gaining a competitive advantage.
20. You can find more info related to similar topics on my blog andreavascellari.com. If you have any questions or you would like to talk more, drop you comments or get in touch via twitter @vascellari (please read my twitter policy if you start to follow me, thanks).