Tuesday, February 17th, 2009...12:43 am
Top Twitter tools for journalists
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I love Twitter, and I find it uniquely suited to help journalists create a community, reach their readers and find out what’s buzzing. Here are some tools I use regularly to help me use Twitter to the best advantage.
This is a short list. There are many, many other Twitter tools. If someone finds one useful that I haven’t mentioned, please share and explain how you use it.
These are my favorite Twitter-related tools:
search.twitter.com: Basically, it’s a tool to search the Twitterverse. I find often it works better than doing a Google search because it gives you results of what’s happening now — not results of recent stories or blog posts.
Here’s how I use it:
- Search by Twitter name. I search by my Twitter name, bloggingmom67, almost daily to see if people have responded to my tweets (so I can answer back) or retweeted my tweets, so I can thank them. This builds your engagement in Twitter. (You can also search by other people’s names to see what they are tweeting or retweeting.
- Search for a topic. If I’m blogging about the single mom in California who recently had octuplets, I can use the search function to find what other bloggers are saying about her. Google searches tend to turn up news sites first, not blogs. Twitter often turns up blogs, first. As I’ve mentioned before, linking to other blogs in your niche can help build your community of readers and increase the chance other bloggers will link to you — which ups your value in the eyes of Google. I also use this feature to see what topics are getting a buzz.
- Search for city or town where you live or work. This is something I do only occasionally to see what people are saying about my community. It could lead to story/blog post ideas or tips on people to follow.
- Check trending topics: This application gives a list of what topics are popular on Twitter at that very moment, which can be useful. And it includes hashtags that are trending. Hashtags are a pound sign before a word; people use it to aggregate all the tweets on a subject in one page. #cny, for example, aggregates all the tweets about Central New York, where I live, on a page that people can follow. If you’re looking for tweets on a particular hashtag, such as #inaug09, you can plug it into this application and find what people are saying.
Twittergrader.com:Â There’s more to this than just a grade.
Here’s how I use it:
- Get your grade: OK, I’m kind of very competitive, so I like knowing my grade. You plug in your Twitter name and get a grade, based on the number of followers you have, the power of this network, the pace of your updates and the completeness of your profile. It’s intended to measure your power in the Twitterverse. Best is 100 percent. It’s fun to see your number go up.
- Find followers: The best part of Twitter.grader is it recommends followers to you. If you grade yourself once a month and follow even a quarter of the folks Twitter grader tells you to follow, you’ll increase your power in the Twitterverse rather quickly.
- Find people to follow in your community: Instead of plugging in your Twitter name, use the search function and type in the name of your town/city. You’ll find out your reach in that community, and get some valuable suggestions of local folks to follow.
Retweet Rank: Retweeting is when one person copies what someone else tweets and tweets it again, usually crediting the original tweet. (The format is: RT: @bloggingmom67 means someone is retweeting my tweet.)
Here’s how I use this tool:
- Find people to follow: This tool give a list of the ever-changing top 10 people whose tweets get retweeted the most. These are good people to follow because they have a lot of credibility in the twitterverse. Plus, if they retweet the blog post link you tweeted, you’re going to get a rush of traffic, because people listen to them. (It has happened to me, and it’s pretty darn amazing.)
- Find own rank: This is more in the category of interesting, not necessary. But it’s good to know your rank if your goal is to increase it. If people regularly retweet your tweeted blog links, you get more bang for your buck on Twitter.
Twitscoop: This application gives you the scoop on what’s hot on Twitter at that very moment. (It’s similar to search.twitter.com, but it pulls up different stuff on occasion, so I find it useful to check both.)
Here’s how I use this tool:
- Check what’s buzzing: You can type in a topic or keyword to see what people are saying about it. Up will pop tweets on the subject, but the coolest part is you’ll get a graph showing how the tweets on the topic are increasing or decreasing over the past six hours. It’s helpful because if you’re blogging on that topic, you want to hit it when it’s hot.
– Gina
I'm Gina Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is studying for a communications Ph.D. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me 
20 Comments
February 17th, 2009 at 5:56 am
Gina,
Helpful tools mentioned here, thanks for sharing. The Twitter ranking is neat. I’m in the six thousand range. =)
It amazing to see the explosion of twitter tools available, and it’s like a hear about a new tool hitting the scene almost daily. Unreal, think about the number of Twitter ebooks or how to guide out there… craziness, everyone, their mom and their mom’s dog is a Twitter expert these days. LOL, what a joke.
-Mig
February 17th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Hi Gina,
First, you have an outstanding blog, and it was great to discover it today! As a former newspaper reporter, I certainly agree with many of your points. I’ve also been encouraged by your blog to establish my own Twitter account. Now, if only newspapers would follow your advice, then we might start seeing greater connections between reporters and readers. I made sure to mention your blog and a couple of your posts today on my own blog, scoopingthenews.blogspot.com. Great job!
Thanks,
Chas
February 18th, 2009 at 1:33 am
Miguel,
Glad you found the tools useful. It does seem like there’s a new one every day. Some are really garbage; some are fun; some are useful.
– Gina
February 18th, 2009 at 1:34 am
Chas,
Thanks for the kind words, mention on your blog and tweets. Appreciate it.
I RSS’d your blog, so I can keep tabs on it.
Take care.
Gina
February 20th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Interested to read today that twitter is *finally* integrating real-time search into the main profile pages.
Those who say it’s a worthless technology are about to get a big shock.
I’m already using the ’search’ function of my tweetie app numerous times a day. Makes google feel verrrrrrryyyyyy ponderous.
Never thought I’d say that!
February 20th, 2009 at 12:23 am
Richard,
Yes … having real-time search on twitter is great.
I think the Twitter naysayers will be eating their hats pretty soon.
With that said, I do think it could do much to improve itself. (Giving you a way to set up friend groups would be great. You can do this on tweetdeck, but I can’t use it at work because you have to download it. I’d also love a way to search my followers more fluidly.)
I agree that Google does seem ponderous at times. It’s great for some things; it’s not great to find out what is happening right this minute because no one has written about it yet.
Thanks for your ideas.
– Gina
March 4th, 2009 at 1:35 am
[...] Promoting her blog: When I post something to my blog, I drive up traffic to my blog by also posting a link (with a clever 140-word introduction or teaser) on Twitter. Sometimes I see health or fitness news items being talked about on Twitter, so I create a post on my blog on the same topic, and then go back to Twitter with a new “tweet” linking to my blog, to drive additional hits to syracuse.com. (She could also check the hot topics on Twitter at search.twitter.com or Twitscoop.) [...]
March 18th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Having real-time search on twitter is awesome. Google rules the search engines and Twitter will rule the conversation search.
Great post! Hope to see you on twitter. Follow me @flashtweeter
March 19th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Thanks for commenting.
Flash Tweet sounds like a neat tool. I’d love to be able to follow a bunch of people at once, instead of going to each page. I’ll check it out.
Will follow you on Twitter, too.
– Gina
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
[...] Top Twitter tools for journalists by Gina Chen [...]
April 10th, 2009 at 8:28 am
[...] Top Twitter tools for journalists by Gina Chen [...]
April 19th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Hi. I read a few of your other posts and wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll links?
May 9th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Twitter is a great form of communication no matter the case. and during times where news reporters cant report, you got that one person with his iphone using a twitter app and broadcasting his tweet to his twitter community feeding the news.My example is when Chris Brogan was at CES and he was tweeting us the latest gadgets before it hit the news, even though he wasnt a journalist i think what he did (live twittering) was a great form of journalism itself. just my opinion though.
May 11th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
[...] has some great ways to embrace the new world of journalism. Check out parts 1 and 2 of their information about tons of resources for [...]
May 30th, 2009 at 7:39 am
Very nice list!
I have also done up a list as well.
The Ultimate List of Twitter Tools @ The Social Media Guide http://bit.ly/zhXUv
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I’ve done a lot of searching on google for this type of content. Glad I finally found this site! Great work.
December 24th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Today’s continental airline incident showed up as a daily new twitter topic at 8:29am PST on my web2express.org digest site. Something is amazing if you compare the time carefully. It emerged as hot topic on twitter while the flight was still in the air. Where did the tweets come from so early? Did someone tweet in the airplane? or people on the ground in Europe got the information early and tweet? Anyway, news travels on twitter fast, very fast!
January 24th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Great article! There is this is a great list of Twitter tools and resources. If you’re looking to search Twitter try http://www.twittersearchengine.net where you can easily search for users and tweets.
January 31st, 2010 at 8:14 am
I am new to twitter and researching on everything possible related to twitter..As most people at work use it i figured i’ll give it a shot..this site really gave me an update to fill in the gaps that i’ve been unclear about..thanks!
January 31st, 2010 at 9:05 am
Twitter is a micro-blogging service for messages of up to 140 characters that can be updated via SMS, Email, Web, Browsers, Desktop clients and whatever else. It can be used for telling the world what you’re doing, sharing insight, communicating with friends and associates and getting answers to your questions.
Leave a Reply