Back Tweets Beat Twitter Search
There has been a lot of buzz going around about the Twitter search, how it can be used and even speculations on whether Twitter is going to have a monetization plan using Twitter search. However, one key area where Twitter search fails miserably is in its ability to read URLs. In Twitter, people typically use short URLs and Twitter search doesn’t have the capacity to read the actual URLs hidden under them.
As a result, if you are one of those marketers who has been putting some effort to spread the word about your website or blog through Twitter and would like to see how it has been working for you Twitter search would probably not be the best tool to use.
Back Tweets fills this gap just perfectly.
Search for any URL and it can read through all the posts with shortened URLs ( irrespective of the URL shortening service used ) and show you the ones that talks about your website. An excellent way to see how your links are traveling through the Twitter world.
I liked the interface that they have for Back Tweets and it is pretty similar to the Twitter search interface. While I loved the way this worked one thing that set me off a bit is the lack of a RSS feed. Its good that I can search about my website URL and happy about the results but why not throw in a small RSS for me to grab the search results and add it to my feed reader and monitor it regulalrly ? I think getting a RSS feed for the search results would be a great addition for BackTweets.
However, while Back Tweet is great for searching Tweets containing your URLs they are no good if you are just searching for a topic or message.
I think a mix of Twitter search with Back Tweets would be an ideal solution as it would allow us to search the content along with the links. The Back tweet guys would probably have an edge on this race as they already have the Back Type Connect application in place which allows them to search for conversation. So the next step would be to integrate both the platforms.
Let’s see if Twitter Search can keep up with the Back Tweet guys.
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Hi Saptarshi,
Thanks for the great write-up. We’re definitely hard at work on improvements to BackTweets and BackType Connect.
By the way, BackTweets has RSS feeds. It is linked near the top left of a search result. Alternately just replace search with search.rss in the URL.
Again, thanks for the mention and the feedback.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for taking time to comment on the post. I missed on the RSS option – can see it now. Its placed nicely but I think it might be even more noticeable and useful if you add an option for Feed towards the bottom of the page ( people tend to look for feed subscription only after they have crawled through the results ) or on the top right ( traditional place where RSS icons are found mostly)
Wishing you all the best 🙂