Following more than a hundred peeps on Twitter? Gets kinda noisy doesn’t it?
Twitter is fantastic for keeping up with friends, news, brands… you name it. Everyone’s sharing fantastic tidbits of information, pictures and videos. So much so that, once you start to follow more than a few people, it’s hard to keep up!
If you’ve been deliberate about following people on Twitter in order to expand your personal sphere of influence or brand awareness, it’s even worse.
And yet, there are many who have found ways to conquer Twitter’s firehose of information and force the network to be useful once more.
They use Lists.
Lists are a simple, yet powerful aspect of Twitter, and can be used in a variety of ways. The most straightforward is to add a number of related accounts that you are interested in to the same List. Once you view that list, all you’ll see is the updates from those peeps!
Ingenious!
I have lists for speakers from specific conferences I’m about to attend, for instance. It lets me easily connect with those speakers and follow what they’re talking about in the days leading up to that event.
Influencers, friends, sources of news – I put them all into their own lists and bounce around depending on what I’m looking to see. I even have lists for my best mastermind groups!
So, if I want to monitor those lists within Agorapulse, I can just go into my Twitter profile settings and select it, right? No! Sorry, Agorapulse doesn’t yet support Twitter lists (but you can ask for it from your dashboard!) ; )
And yet, Agorapulse has AWESOME listening, right?! Why can’t se use that to our advantage?
We can. And I’m going to show you how. Ready?
Fire up your Agorapulse account in one tab and your favorite Twitter list in another (or just have an idea of what Twitter users you want to pay attention to).
What we’re going to do here is take advantage of Agorapulse Listening + Twitter’s advanced boolean search capability. It sounds awesome, and it is. By the end of this article, not only will you have list monitoring within Agorapulse, you’ll be speaking geek-speak!! (Boolean operators are logical ways to combine or exclude elements, and are imprinted on these awesome socks from Brandwatch):
To simulate a list we’re going to construct a series of Twitter handles and use the Twitter search function “from:[handle]” and the boolean operator OR. When you set up a search in this way (and you can do it within Twitter’s search if you want to see it live), what you’re telling Twitter is that you want to see tweets from the users listed, and that it can be tweets from any of those users.
That’s why the “OR” is critical. If you were to use the operator “AND” it would only show tweets that were from every Twitter user listed, and that won’t work. We want to see everyone’s tweets.
Let’s say you want to see everything that Jeff Bullas, Ian Cleary, Donna Mortiz and I tweet out. You would create this search string:
from:jeffbullas OR from:iancleary OR from:sociallysorted OR from:mike_allton
Copy and paste that into a Twitter search and you’ll see all our recent tweets! Pretty cool, huh?
Just getting started.
Open Agorapulse, head over to your Twitter profile and click on Settings. Go to Listening and create a new Search. Name it whatever you want (just like you would a Twitter list), and copy or type in a string like the one above. Save it.
Now your Listening tab will have all of the tweets from those folks!
Wait. Are you worried that maybe now your Listening tab is too busy? That you might get overwhelmed by tweets from other people and miss, say, some of your other search results that might not be as frequent?
No problem!
You can filter by searches, or even disable searches! Whatever works best for you.
If you only want to monitor and pop into a saved list search once in a while, keep it disabled within settings until you’re interested in what’s there. Or use the filter option to pick and choose what it is you’re seeing within the tab.
You can even SEARCH the saved results!
MIND. BLOWN.
Retweet. Reply. Favorite. Even assigned tweets to other team members.
All within your social media management tool.
Agency owners running Twitter profiles for clients will love being able to use this to monitor client & competitive accounts easily. Influencers. Campaigns. You name it.
RELATED: Agorapulse Review: How To Make Social Media Management Easy
Want to get fancy?
Limit those searches by dates, geographic location, specific keywords… even filter out tweets by using a negative operator “-[keyword]” that removes any tweet containing that keyword.
Now you can rock your Agorapulse system and make it a Twitter List monitoring machine. Who’s the hero for your clients?
You are.
