Today during SEO 411 on Twitter (#SEO411) one of the questions was:

What books do you recommend for learning SEO processes that aren’t outdated? E-books?

Here are some of the responses:

I’m sure these people are are earnest in their opinions, but they are looking at it in the wrong way. These answers are based on tactics. Yes, the most effective tactics are evolving quickly and constantly. However Search Engine Optimization is not changing.

SEO is the intersection of 3 factors. In order of importance:

1. The content visitors search (query) – This changes quickly and erratically based on the visitors’ need and satisfaction with the results.
2. The system that pairs search to content – This changes regularly. There are many search engines. These systems are skewed toward the results that make money.
3. The available content (you and your competitors) – This is a crap shoot. Some verticals are competitive and evolving, some are stagnant.

Good books will make these points, the rest is gravy.

The problem with most books and blogs is that they focus on tactics. Tactics don’t go away. Beginners don’t understand which tactics are right and advanced practitioners are looking to revisit things they haven’t used recently. At any given point the tactics that are being published are things that people are having success with, so, the search engines are already working to devalue the tactic.

But, here is the thing — SEO tactics don’t go away.

The newer the books the more diverse and up to date the list of tactics will be, but every one of the tactics will still be employable. Good SEO is about strategy not tactics.

credit: *^ ^* Sherry

Over the last three weeks I’ve seen a rather stupid rash of posts claiming that social media experts are a myth. Most recently an article at ereleases went popular on Sphinn.

Many of these articles are ridiculous, duplicitous, and unhelpful. They make claims like:

1. Social media is new and constantly evolving
2. There is no right way to use social media
3. What works for one may not work for another

Social Media is NOT New

First, social media is not new. The name is new but the content is not. The modern social media platforms started wide scale use in 2002, more or less, with Friendster and Myspace. Blogs, and their communities, predate that (1997). Before that there were already forums, user groups, and Bulletin Board Systems! The Internet has been a social medium for a very long time. All the way back to the 1970s the back-bone concept of Twitter has been available, but without the character limit. People have been using written telecommunication interactions to pass information and have conversation for more than 30 years.

While social media is evolving it isn’t really moving forward; platforms like Facebook and Twitter are actually taking retrograde action into behavior that is more like forums (Hashtags, Groups, and Fan Pages).

There IS a Wrong Way to Use Social Media

Second, there is a wrong way to use every platform. Reddit has different etiquette than Digg, Facebook has different etiquette than Myspace, and every platform has a different group that are their power users. The background and important issue for the power user group creates a clear set of negative actions on the platform; Dan Zarrella just shared why you don’t bash Twitter on Facebook.

What Works for One May Not Work for Another

This is a truism. Every time you use a truism to make an argument Socrates shoots a kitten from a cannon.

Defining Experts

Experts are people who know considerably more than the general populace about a given subject. It doesn’t matter the number of hours (though 10,000 is a popular distinction), even after a year in a profession you will know more about the job than most people. There are countless people that have been working on the web who have been actively engaged in multiple social platforms, forums, or blogging reaching back for 5 to 10 years. There are thousands of people who understand marketing strategy, web analytics, blogging, etc. and also spend thousands of hours on multiple platforms and communities to understand the etiquette of the most popular sites. These people can easily describe the communities and their norms, in addition to offering other value to your web presence.

If you are worried about the expertise of the person you are talking to ask, “Yes, and how does that support your other work?” If they don’t have some way of leveraging the knowledge, they can’t really help you, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know the landscape in and out. A social media expert is not really useful unless they have some additional skill to connect to their knowledge.

</end rant>

This post is a guest post by Rose Spitler the community manager for Medfinds.com and the voice behind @medfinds

Once upon a time, I had a job with no external Internet. It was a magical time, when I used Twitter from my (non-smart) phone to capture the hilarious things my coworkers and customers said. I also used the web interface, but again, in a very casual way.

These days, my Twitter life is not so relaxed. I still have my carelessly-maintained personal account, but now also share responsibility for a business stream. Since I’m not the only one tweeting on this stream, we use CoTweet, which allows multiple users to access it. It’s a popular tool, used by big companies, and described by one user thusly: “And all the sexy companies I know of that have sexy employees making sexy tweets all use CoTweet.” /via @nocash. This is an excellent description of us, as well, except that my tweets aren’t sexy.

So, then why are we here? Simply put, because I don’t really like it, for several specific reasons.

First, it doesn’t know how to handle protected accounts. While it’s quick to return with “Twitterer not found” when asked to produce a non-existent profile, it provides no indication that a person has protected their tweets. When asked to display their updates, CoTweet only gives me an infinitely spinning working-indicator thingy.

Second, I can’t see followers/following without switching to Twitter’s web interface, which requires me to be logged in through my personal account. Luckily for me, I do have a personal account, but this does not seem like a useful feature for a professional application. I already have enough tabs open, thank you, I don’t need more.

Third, it only shows a limited number of older tweets when looking at individual profiles, and not a consistent number. My personal account is chatty, and contains a lot of @ replies, and I enjoy exploring other people’s conversations. In order to see all updates (older ones, and mentions of profiles I don’t follow), I again have to switch to the web interface. Lame.

Finally, it takes a long time to load new tweets, but loads them directly into the viewing window, pushing down the ones I’m reading. I’m a habitual multitasker, and easily distracted. I like that the web interface holds new tweets until I tell it I’m ready to read them. I do not like having to choose between catching up on the over-night news or spending endless time scrolling.

There are some features I do really like. It lists Klout score on profiles, which I find more entertaining than actually useful. It allows scheduled tweets, which neither the web interface nor Brizzly (which I am trying for the purposes of comparison) do. It does a nice job of managing conversations related to my account, even though I can’t see those not related. Because viewing profiles does not require changing screens, managing my relationships to other profiles is markedly easier than on other platforms, within the previously described constraints.

Overall, I don’t actually hate CoTweet, but with the many, many options out there, I will definitely continue looking for a tool feels more intuitive and user-friendly.

I’ve seen SEO + PPC = SEM referenced a number of times this week. I don’t agree with that formula.

So, here are the terms the way I use them.

Search Engine Optimization = Actions taken to improve position within organic search placement
PPC = Pay Per Click
CPM = Cost Per Thousand
CPA = Cost Per Action/Acquisition
Paid Inclusion = Search placements that are bought but not attributed as sponsored
Paid Search = Paid placements in search engines (includes PPC, CPM and Paid Inclusion)
Social Media Optimization = Actions taken to improve results from social media platforms (paid or organic)

Search Engine Marketing = All actions taken to drive traffic, money or impressions through search platforms. This term is currently evolving through the debate over whether Facebook and Twitter should be classified as person to person search platforms.

Search Engine Optimization + Paid Search = Search Engine Marketing

Last week, Coremetrics, Omniture and WebTrends announced features that allow their respective users to measure certain aspects of Facebook.  My review of these announcements, so far, indicates a parallel product from these companies.

Omniture announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow customers to refine their Facebook ad campaigns. Utilizing their Search Tool “Search Center Plus”, Omniture customers will be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network.

Coremetrics announced that they have been able to partner with Facebook to utilize their Impression Attribution tool,  which can record something as passive as an ad impression on the Facebook site and, utilizing cookies,  tie it back to the customer activity on your website.  As well the data is set against your other ad campaigns so that you can compare and contrast.

Finally Webtrends’ announced (technically Webtrends’ announcement was the week prior to the others) that they have a way to “scrape” data from Facebook, Twitter etc, using an API and can tie the data against other ad campaign data.

Sounds a little redundant doesn’t it?  That’s because for the most part it is the same thing.  The key here is that Facebook has finally opened itself up to these companies to allow the respective API code into their system.  My understanding is that this API has been working for Twitter measurement for some time now.  The ability to do the same type of tracking that you can tie into your main analytics program is a big step forward in Social Media measurement.

Its important that Facebook is allowing these partnerships.  It’s too bad that they didn’t make the announcement themselves.  Not that Web Analytics needs validation from social media (I’d say Web Analytics is more commonly accepted as a company need than social media in most businesses today, but that might not be the case tomorrow!)  It is important that all three companies have announced a product that will help with social media measurement and that the product is fairly similar.

I’m interested to know how analysts will use these tools to analyze their respective clients’ social media engagement.  These announcements show that social media tracking is an important piece of web analytics and should be an important piece of your social media campaign.  I’m glad that the big boys in the web analytics world are taking social media metrics seriously.  My only concern is that the analysis stops here.

Engagement is only once piece of social media measurement but it is a big piece and right now seems to be the most tangible aspect of SM tracking.

My hope is to follow up to this article with a side by side comparison of the Social Media dashboard / report for each vendor’s system.

Would love to hear from anyone utilizing any of these three companies’ social media tracking tools on what you like and don’t like about the tool.

credit: luc legay

Social media is supposed to be a conversation. How do you make a conversation tangible with standard measurements? We would liken it to the term “engagement,” which defines how deep a visitor was on a site regardless of purchase. Typically engagement is measured by looking at several metrics. We can do the same thing for measuring your conversation rating. For our purposes engagement means the three-Rs: reference, response and retweet.

Ideally what you’d like to do is read, listen and watch every mention and interaction. However, without some sort of third party tool that will be next to impossible. There are several companies out there that can provide this sort of tracking. VMS is a well known and established company that has transitioned itself from a solely traditional media tracker to more robust tracking than anything you will need starting off. However, if you want to dive in head first, you should look at their software. An alternative would be a newer and lesser-known company called StatsIT. They offer a social media dashboard that is pretty compelling. Finally, Coremetrics, Omniture and Google Analytics all offer some solutions that are integrated with their existing software, however these solutions are all things that you can design yourself. You can build a Twitter API that will scrape any mention of your brand terms and will send the data to your database or analytics provider of choice. RowFeeder offers a service that populates a real time spreadsheet of your keyword (tell them Carlos sent you).

You’ll need to start with the metrics that you think are important to you. You could go as basic as appending marketing links to the tweets with URL’s and then measuring clicks, visitors, shoppers, and orders for each link. However, you can only measure your online statistics this way. The metrics you might be more concerned with, or rather will be more successful at utilizing immediately are the statistics that you can glean from Twitter itself. Our metrics are intended to save you the time and cost of a developer in the short run and help you improve your engagement immediately.

Before jumping into the metrics we recommend, there are some points you should keep in mind. You should take a holistic and a detailed approach to each of these metrics. What this means is that you should have a top level mark for all of your social media, then a secondary level for each individual account and then you should consider grouping these by brand term, category, or region. Finally, you should be able to dive into each account and break down your measurement by individual data line.

Several metrics that you could use are the following:

1. Sentiment
2. Reach
3. Experience Rating
4. Quality Score

Sentiment

As mentioned above, the search mechanism can be used to gauge how people feel about your brand. However, this is a fairly nebulous measurement and is not entirely precise. A live person looking through the tweets best determines sentiment, but Twitter Search can do a rudimentary filtering. Filter out invalid (non-actionable) tweets and if possible move them to the more appropriate bucket. We suggest that you establish a plan for responding to both positive and negative sentiment. You’ll also want to tailor these to your specific request; keep your eye out for tweets that have questions. Tweets that contain questions are the low hanging fruit for improving your sentiment values. Example of sentiment monitoring for Twitter: Twitrratr.com

Reach

Reach is the potential network of people who could be influenced by your social media. Think of a pyramid. Say your Twitter account has 100 followers, and in turn each of those followers has 100 followers of their own. Your reach would be 100 x 100, or a 10,000-person network (second-degree followers). You can then set up a query to show how many impressions per tweet you got and then divide that by your potential reach to determine a benchmark for success.

If you are doing a good job engaging your followers you should see a growing reach value. Once you have a large following (more than a 1,000 followers) you should consider refining your reach to only the people that have directly engaged in the recent past. Twitter will catalog either 9-days or 100-pages of tweets–which ever comes first. Assume that your real reach is roughly the value based on the people who engage (reference, reply or retweet) in a 24-hour period. So, if you generally have 100 users engage in a day either an expansion of breadth (engagement number) or depth (second-degree followers) should be considered a success.

The reason that reach should be considered with breadth in mind as you grow is because Twitter as a channel has a high loss rate. Only about 40 percent of Twitter users are still active after one month of sign-up. This doesn’t mean that no one comes back. If you have a large following reach is best measured by activity—not raw numbers.

Experience Rating

Experience rating is how you compare specific users based on the influence and quality of their interaction with your brand or account. So if @jhandy says that he likes your product but he only has a following of 10 and has never made a comment before, his rating would likely be 1. However if @welch says that he likes your product and he has a following of 10,000 and has made 100 comments on your product, he would likely have a rating of 100. You can aggregate your RT’s and mentions and then base them on the average rating to determine whether what is being mentioned is really impacting anything. If you find that your growth is slowing your should consider engaging your middle to high experience rated followers.

Quality Score

Finally, quality score is used to measure the number of mentions or comments you receive on your tweet. If you have one tweet and get 30 responses then you’d have a 30:1 ratio. You should be looking at your quality score on the small level of individual tweets and on the larger level of total engagement for the day versus total tweets for the day.

There will be a point where your followers and reach will slow. This is the time that quality score will be of particular interest. If you do not have a high quality score when your growth slows you should be investing in improving your engagement with your mid-rated users.

These are just some of the methods that you can use to measure your social media conversations and engagement. Creating your performance indicators will vary based on your goals and particular vertical.

I am seeing a disturbing trend in web design blogs: the belief that the fold is an obsolete concept. While Paddy Donnelly creates a graphically compelling story line it is ultimately flawed. You cannot presume that you have compelling content; the vast majority of content isn’t inherently engaging.

I’m going to be blunt. If you believe that the fold doesn’t exist you are a lazy designer. Lazy in that you are not following up to see how your designs are used. Lazy in that you are not taking a multi-platform approach. Lazy in that you are putting personal aesthetics in front of function to save yourself time.

Here are some of the twitter responses from actual working designers in user experience, designers that are responsible for the function of sites they design and website analysts:

The arguments that many designers use is that good content overcomes the concept of visible content. I have no issue with that statement. I have witnessed in web analytic data that changing the content can affect performance indicators related to engagement. Here is the thing–good content can be a solution to for design flaws–good content is not a design element. Good design does not use content as a crutch.

Good web design has the following qualities:

1. Presents consistent experience
2. Offers presentation flexibility (allows either short or long copy)
3. Works within functional browser requirements

Don’t believe the hype from designers. Look at your data, consider your audience and consider your goal.

Design for a purpose. Analyze for a goal. Listen to your visitors.

There are many tools you can use for analysis that you don’t have to buy that will help you become a better analyst.  I don’t necessarily mean data compilers (other than your head), but rather just using your skills and the skills of some of your peers to help improve your analysis and insight to your company.

For usability review

If part of your role is to help the creative team polish their projects before they are launched, here are some tips on how you can be of benefit to this team without being a true usability expert.

Past data benchmarks: You can rely on your past analysis or even better, keep a “cheetsheet” matrix of benchmarks from past analysis.  Of course this assumes that the projects are similar in spirit.  However in general, you should have some overall benchmarks that you can relate to any project, such as do your visitors prefer auto starting video vs. manually started video, or an auto rotation slide show vs. a manually started slide show.  You can use these numbers to gently remind the creative team whether the project would be more successful if it takes a slightly different direction.  Ideally you might even want to create a “best practices for video projects” document that you can share with your creative team.

Technical properties of the user: It’s also important to keep up on the latest info about the technical make up of your visitor.  i.e. do more people use 1024 by 768 screen resolution and is your project geared to be all above the fold at those dimensions?  This will help you determine whether the full project will be seen by the visitors.  Your analytics provider should have this report handy for you.

User standpoint and wisdom of the crowd: Hopefully, you yourself are a user of the internet.  You know what you like and don’t like.  Chances are if you don’t understand how a project works or if you don’t feel like the project is going to help the customer reach the end goal, chances are it won’t, so speak up!  My recommendation is to try to pretend you are a novice internet user, then review the project from that standpoint.  While your creative team produces great work, they often forget to consider that not every user is looking for frills and thrills and as well not every user is familiar with the latest and greatest.

For data analysis

If you struggle with creating an easily digestible way of providing analysis…

Benchmark matrix: again, you may not think that every project is related to each other but there are several ways you can compile a matrix.  You can take it from a metrics point of view: compare all projects from a conversion standpoint and then break them into divisions such as video vs slide show vs landing page vs wish list, etc.  You can create multiple matrices such as all KPI’s for video projects, then a separate matrix for all KPI’s for landing pages, etc.  The key point is to create an easily accessible reference tool for yourself so that you can determine the success of a project without getting into too many details.  This will help you answer quick, high level questions that your VIP’s may have.

One page brief: if you’ve downloaded 15 spreadsheets worth of data and feel like you could put together a 20 page slide show but you know that you are going to be talking to high level executives, try writing a one page summary of your findings.  This will help you keep the data high level and will allow you to express yourself without having to create too many graphs and diagrams.  Most executives like to be able to think in a one track setting, so giving them 3-4 paragraphs worth of information without any distracting graphs may be the best way for them to digest your findings.  A one page brief is also a great way to leave a legacy of the project findings for future review.

Dashboard approach: if a brief seems too long winded you can also take a dashboard approach.  Avinash Kaushik provides a great example of how to create a dashboard.  The essence of it is: graph; summary of metrics; impacts/areas for improvement; and next steps  I find this to be best for recurring data such as a weekly, monthly or quarterly review of KPI’s but you can definitely tailor this to specific projects if you so choose.

Final free tool

If you struggle to find meaning to your data maybe try looking outside of your company for the answer.

Analytics forums: the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum is a great place to look up questions that you have that might have already been asked and answered.  If you don’t find your question, simply ask it and be amazed at how fast you will get a response from your peers.  Twitter can also be useful if you already engage with plenty of other web analysts and as well if your tweet contains the #measure or #usability hash tag.  You can also try the #measure Twibe to ask a question.  You can also just try “googling” your question and browse the blogs and forums that are out there.  Utilize these types of forums if you just can’t seem to wrap your head around a certain data point and what the meaning of it is. Of course, this assume that your company allows you to divulge this type of information, or that you can be vague enough about the details of your question while still getting a productive answer.

Been trying to get a post up all day and not liking what I’ve written.  So I’ll say this: Who Dat Gonna Beat Dem Saints on Sunday?  Not the Colts.  Maybe Peyton Manning’s commercials.  However more than likely, I hope that Social Media has a big win on Sunday.  Many major advertiser have opted to invest in Social Media campaigns that aren’t necessarily taking place on this Sunday, but in general the money that might have gone to pay for a 30 second TV spot is now going toward brand awareness in a different aspect and social media in general.  For example, most of you have heard about Pepsi devoting it’s former Superbowl budget to it’s Project Refresh and increasing the social aspect of it’s brand.  It’s using Social media to advertise the fact that Pepsi is not entirely about getting every dollar out of you to put into their pockets but instead has a significant social awareness policy that they’d like you to know about.

The questions I have are these: will the companies that have been in Superbowl commercials in the past be missed?  Will the audience continue the viral campaign that’s out there about the fact that these companies are not spending money on the commercial and instead trying a different approach?  Will these companies feel any negative effect by NOT advertising during the Superbowl?  Will they focus on a social media campaign during the Superbowl and will it be effective? What will YOU do on Super Sunday?  Will you browse Twitter and Facebook during the game?  Will you see if there’s any social activity during a commercial break?  Will you tweet or update your status during the game?  Will you check in on Foursquare prior to arriving at your party or bar?  Will brands engage you after the Superbowl with specific reference to the game or to commercials?

On the company/brand aspect, I think an effective strategy would have been to engage your Facebook fans and Twitter followers in the weeks leading up to the Superbowl to either have a ‘sign up for texts during the Superbowl to win something” or follow us and look for tweets during the commercial break for a special announcement.  This could be a huge win for a company and more so than paying for a commercial slot.  If you can take the eyes of the customer off the tv for 10 seconds, you steal the advertising away from whoever paid for a commercial?  You can’t do that if you pay for a commercial yourself, you only compete to be the most memorable commercial of the Superbowl.  I also think if you utilized something like “tweet to predict the quarterly and half time scores for a chance to win xx” could be a good way to engage your followers.  Maybe bars could have utilized Foursquare to have the “mayor” host a private party at their bar?

I’m sure the talking head of these companies have their strategies in place already.  I definitely think it will be hard to utilize an effective social campaign during the Superbowl without paying for some advertising space.  The NBA All star game and the finals tried to do some social media advertising campaigns with companies, but I don’t know if they were very effective. 

As an end user, I do think that Twitter will be a great forum for me to chat back and forth about the game, maybe broadcast stuff like, “Next play – 40 yard screen pass to Reggie, callin it now!”  It’s really no different than sending a text during the game, which I’ve done in years past, except it could be more effective since I can send the tweet out to a larger audience.  Had a brand engaged me prior to the Superbowl I might have opened Ubertwitter duringa commerical break and perused to see what said brand had to say about the game or whatever their shpiel was.  I don’t really follow a lot of brands though, so I probably won’t do this.  I probably will check in on Foursquare and I’ll probably become the mayor of my friends house since I don’t think he’s ever checked in on Foursquare at his house.  Sweet, I’ll finally be a mayor!

What are your thoughts on the Social Superbowl?  Is this a big challenge this weekend, or does it really not matter and Monday will be like any other Monday for Brands and their social media strategies?

This is an excerpt taken from Making the Most of Twitter: Search, Tools and Analytics. Visit our download page to buy the whole 25-page article.

This post covers in-depth how to use the search function to monitor Twitter. This will help you to find the people that you want to talk to and to understand the fast moving torrent of information and thought that Twitter provides.

One of your primary opportunities for leveraging Twitter is their own site search (search.twitter.com). Once you are familiar with this feature you will have better understanding of what third party tools are working with, why there are limitations and a clearer sense of what Twitter is building toward.

Twitter Search works very much like the search engines you are used to (Google, Bing, etc.); it employs 16 operators, or additives that affect the search’s meaning.

Operator	Meaning
No Operator –> user driven	Containing both “user” AND “driven”
Quotation Marks –> “user driven“	Containing the exact phrase “user driven”.
OR –> user OR driven	Containing either “user” or “driven” (or both).
Minus –> user -driven	Containing “user” but not “driven”.
Hash –> #measure	Containing the hashtag “meaure”.
From: –> from:UserDriven	Sent from username “UserDriven”.
To: –> to:UserDriven	Sent to username “UserDriven”.
@ –> @UserDriven	Containing the username “UserDriven”
Near: –> Sale near:seattle	Containing “sale” and was sent near “Seattle”.
Within: –> near:98122 within:2.5km	Sent with in “2.5 km” of “98122”.
Since: –> sale since:2009-10-04	Containing “sale” and sent since the date “2009-10-04”.
Until: –> sale until:2009-10-04	Containing “sale” and sent up till the date “2009-10-04”.
–> delivery	Containing “delivery” and positive sentiment.
–> delivery	Containing “delivery” and negative sentiment.
? –> sale ?	Containing “sale” and a question.
Filter:links –> funny filter:links	Containing “funny” and includes a link.
Source: –> funny source:tweetdeck	Containing “funny” and entered via “TweetDeck”.

Several of the operators are old favorites Quotation Marks, OR, and Minus are available in most popular search engines. The new tools are the user, location, temporality (time) and sentiment (feeling).

User and Hashtags

To: and From: are most powerful once you have identified key influencers for your customer group. From: will allow you to section out all of the tweets sent by the specific user and can be paired with search terms to identify the specific issues that you need to address. To: is used to identify who is speaking to, or dialoguing with, a specific account. The to: operator returns all tweets that start with the selected username.

Example:

@userdriven where is the meet up?

This will show up for to:userdriven.

I am going to the meetup @userdriven is sponsoring.

This will not show up for to:userdriven

If you want to return all mentions of a username then you use “@username” so @userdriven will return all tweets to the account and all uses of the username in tweets.

The hashtag # is used to tie together tweets on the same subject. One of the best examples of hashtag use is #journchat. Journchat has a large group of participants and a regular time each week when they hold a discussion, and everyone who wishes to participate can employ the hashtag to take part and follow the action. The hash is what allows Twitter to accomplish limited multi-person dialogue.

User and hashtags are the only operators that function as stand alone queries.

Location

Near: and within: will allow you to find out what people are saying in the vicinity of a specific location. For near: you can use a large area like City (Seattle), a smaller area like a Zip Code (98122), or extremely specific Longitudinal/Latitudinal values (47.625193,-122.3574).

Within: requires the near: operator and works best when paired with kilometers (km). Currently the dropdown that is found under the map on Twitter Search is in kilometers so you will do better to maintain consistency. Also, open Google Maps to verify that Twitter is correctly assessing your near: operator in the way you expect.

If you have both online and brick and mortar locations leveraging near: and within: will be especially valuable to you. Consider running vicinity searches around real world locations in tandem with online campaigns to drive awareness of your physical location and to expedite customer service resolution.

Temporality

Knowing when people react to your account, brand or product can be very useful. Unfortunately, Twitter has very finite server capacity. The result is that it does not hold data for very long. For the operators since: and until: Twitter only returns results going back 72-hours. This means that if it takes you more than three days to recognize that Twitter has spiked you won’t be able find the issue directly through Twitter Search. This means that even though you can use these operators to segment a single day (sale since:2009-10-04 until:2009-10-04) you have to do it very close to that date. The technical limit for the operator is seven days, but most phrases are purged more frequently than that.

For example:

If today is October 6, 2009 then you can use since: and until: for October 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th.

This means that Monday is extremely important for your Twitter campaigns. This is the only day that you can assess the run into a weekend spike.

Sentiment

One of the major concerns of social media marketing and brand PR is sentiment–how people feel about your product, service or company. Twitter addresses this with  and . These operators, signified by a smile and a frown emoticon, pull back tweets with positive or negative buzzwords (or the actual emoticon).

While great in concept the execution of these searches can be spotty. Both operators will return a set of emoticons that are essentially neutral, causing overlap in the returned search. Also, you will see a variety of results where you are not the subject of the sentiment. The sentiment operators are a good way to take a snapshot of the Twitter’s feelings.

The last operator that relates to sentiment is ? . It doesn’t actually affect sentiment, but it does allow you to find actionable issues. Appending ? to your queries allows you to see tweets that ask a question. So if you pair it with or you are more likely to find a tweet that has a clear solution you can bring to the author.

Special note: sentiment modifiers can disrupt location modifiers.

Source and Filter:links

Source: returns all tweets that were delivered through a specific channel–like Tweetie, UberTwitter or the main site. This is useful for charting the value of advertising in third-party tools or web portals.

Filter:links return all tweets with links in them. At this time I am not aware of other valid filters, but Twitter does plan to add retweets and home timeline segmentation to the search function, which will likely be other filters.

The real power of these operators is in combining them together to find opportunities for visibility or service of your customers. Combining Location and Sentiment can help you overcome a localized issue. Combining Location ? can help you find a business opportunity (e.g. lunch near:98122 within:1km ?) like finding people looking for lunch in your neighborhood.

Now that you know how to construct your complicated advanced search let’s cover some methods for saving you some time retrieving the results.

If you use the search box in the right navigation of your profile page you will find a “Save this search” button under the “update” button of your profile.

This is a good way to respond to searches quickly. You have your update field available, but the interface is a little confusing. Be sure you aren’t typing your new searches into your updated field when you use this method.

The second tool Twitter offers for leveraging search in a persistent way is a search widget. You can find this widget in the Goodies section of Twitter. It will allow you to set up a widget with any search that you want and define how you want it to display. We have set up a simple reputation portal that lets you enter a query to see positive, negative, tweets with questions, tweets employing the #fail hashtag, tweets with links and retweets using via. You can download the page here: http://www.userdrivenchange.com/twitrep.php

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