smokingmole's home

Just reading a great article talking about searching through twitter and how beneficial it is to marketers... here's a snippet:

"There are other ways to leverage Twitter search too. Mint.com, a personal finance service, constantly monitors trending topics, looking for matches with keywords important to the company, said Stew Langille, vice president of marketing at Mint.com.

For instance, it recently found the term "one trillion" trending up. "We're not out there saying 'Oh, well, one trillion is trending, let's go out and tweet about it,'" he said. "But we'll go out and make great content about it and put it out there, and the community grabs it and becomes an advocate for us."

"One trillion" was trending up because of news coverage about the government bailouts. Mint.com developed articles and a video using the term "one trillion" and posted them to its finance publication. The content drove several thousand visitors to its site over a couple months, he said.

Twitter search offers a unique opportunity for marketers, Sullivan said. "You know exactly who's asking," he said. That's compared to search engines. "Imagine if everyone who clicked on a link, you got a picture of them and their name as well. That doesn't happen on Google but it happens all the time on Twitter."

Read the full article on PCworld.com.

Just started taking a closer look a the Tweeple we're following with the @PriceDoc account.  I've already used Twerpscan to dump all the people who haven't tweeted in the last three months... I figure, if they aren't active, why am I even following them? (Even if they are directly related to our industry: health care cost/price transparency)

I've been using Topify to manage the interaction between the people who start following us every day, but, even after I dumped hundreds of people, we were quickly capped at 2000 again.  Back to the drawing board... After Googling a ton, here is a list of the articles that I found useful for selectively analyzing the people that we are following:

Props Blog dot Com - Following the Right People - Seven simple steps to begin analyzing your followings (yes, I said it).  I really liked the suggestion to use Tweepi to analyze new tweeple, as well as the hint to check out Refollow. I haven't decided to completely dump all the people who aren't following us back, but that might be a step taken soon...

Basically Becky - How to use Refollow - Great read on using Refollow to manage your twitter followers/followings and find new people.

Twitip - Who to follow, Who NOT to Follow - Quality of followers is more important than quantity... Find real people: even those with just a few followers may actually be a great connection! Their stream is sparse enough that your tweets will be seen and hopefully appreciated. They will have time to respond and start conversations, to build connections and maybe even share your message via retweet!

Create with Nate - Following the Right People - Different marketing approaches to twitter, with different recommendations based on your personal objectives. Great read.

It's still a learning process!

Anybody have any tips that I'm missing here for deciding who to follow?

Thanks,

Brad Crowell

PriceDoc.com