Some practical ideas for filtering leads out of Twitter

Here is a conversation some of my friends had yesterday on Facebook. Thought it might be useful to some of you twitter people.

Peter Syme

Twitter ? I really need to nail this. Background. I have various twitter streams running and when we do answer them they are driving business however, is their anyway to filter so we only see what we want to see? Example a quick search of or stag and hen party related streams today produced 5 people leads of people asking for ideas for their stag and hen party. That is a potential £7.5-£10k income. That is a free lead stream worth a potential £2.5-£3m a year. Even at a very low conversion rate it is getting way to interesting to be just treating it adhoc as we do now. 20 hours ago

- David Long You can use various tools like Hootsuite to just stream the content based on your preferred search terms. Or you can have it delivered in an email by using the service from Twilert.com. This has the added attraction of limiting the results by geography.
  I’m sure there are other services out there so it will be interesting to so what others recommend.
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Jeremy Dent There are so many filtering tools but none that I know that integrate with anything else! I would anchor all your streams with HootSuite, though and stream content asDavid Long suggests.
  
  20 hours ago
- Graham Hunt Google reader rss feed taken from topsy and check every day
  
  20 hours ago via Mobile ·
- Andrew Crook Hootsuite allows you to have multiple filtered streams.
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Jeremy Dent Use Google Alerts for relevant phrases but, as I said, you can’t bring the results into a single dashboard.
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Graham Hunt It works great in my particular workflow using a google reader app on iPhone and iPad. All types of alerts in one place
  
  20 hours ago via Mobile ·
- Lilach Bullock Try http://brandchirp.com/ btw I mentioned this and several other tools in my blog earlier today… http://www.socialable.co.uk/20-vital-twitter-management-tools-for-2012/
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme I have the multiple streams being fed with core search terms but the still pick up thousands of tweets a day where I am looking for something that can be more accurate so it only picks up those that are asking for help rather than the thousands who are talking about what they did and what they are going to do etc
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme Had a look at brandchip Lilach as well as several other tools they all seem to do much the same but none are accurate enough to do what I want. If may be a case of off shoring this to a human to follow multipile stream all day as all the tools seem to feed to much tweets so you still have to scan them all
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Graham Hunt That’s why google reader is so good Peter. Much easier to scan and filter than a column of tweets
  
  20 hours ago via Mobile ·
- Ian R McAllister ‎Graham is right: the answers Google Reader, now what’s the question! The problem with Twitter – or any tool – is that there is too much information flowing through Twitter. Its a pure Man Machine Interface problem. So you need to set-up some filtering process. That’s effectively what the tools do, but Google Reader makes this moreeffective and efficent. I read nearly 1000 newspapers in the morning in less than 5mins, thanks to Google Reader. I also get all the market information that I need. If there’s a critic, its that the interface is frankly boring, but its the information and headlines that count
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Adrian Higgs Great thread, people. I’m a rank beginner in this area so can’t contribute much, but would like to thank you all for the great suggestions.
  
  20 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme Off to play with google reader. I take it this is different from google alerts? As I already have them set up
  
  19 hours ago ·
- Ian R McAllister Yes! GReader is an RSS reader, where as GAlerts sends you an eMail every so often when it spots something. So for starters go to a website, finds its RSS feed, click it then select to read it in GReader
  
  19 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme How does google reader pull tweets from twitter though as they do not have a RSS feed or am I being thick ?
  
  19 hours ago ·
- Ian R McAllister Yes, there’s an RSS feed from twitter: per account, or per search/keyword from search.twitter.com. Or as Graham will I am sure soon show you, via Topsy
  
  19 hours ago ·
- Graham Hunt There used to be Ian but now I get them from topsy. No longer an rss feed for search.twitter.com put the search into topsy and import feed into reader. Set up reader to just show headlines and group searches into folders. I have folders of essential reads, Spanish news, Spanish property, twitter feeds etc. I can work through an average of 1000 entries in about ten mins with actions taken etc. am producing the Spain is different magazine exclusively through this method and ifttt then curating the stuff into the mag
  
  19 hours ago via Mobile ·
- Peter Syme Found the twitter feed on google reader guys this is very very interesting many thanks
  
  19 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme Going to take a bit more refinement to get my search phrases right but feeding a constant steam of leads whilst cutting out the noise that you get with tweetdeck/hootsuite etc Excellent many thanks guys
  
  16 hours ago ·
- Ian R McAllister Ask better question in better groups, and you will always get better answers! Just don’t expect us to solve world poverty and hunger – yet
  
  16 hours ago ·
- Graham Hunt That poverty and hunger thing? Solved it last week but shared it in the wrong group
  
  16 hours ago ·
- Sally Church Bit late to the party here, but yes tweak your keywords then shovel them through Topsy then into Google Reader via RSS will generate more leads than you could probably handle over time
  
  16 hours ago ·
- Sally Church The other thing is that if you star them in GReader and activate an IFTTT rule to put them somewhere else, you can then parse the selected ones who need help more easily. I put mine into Pinboard and choose which ones to add as action items into OmniFocus but others might prefer Evernote or something else. If I skim the raw feeds at breakfast over coffee, by the time I get in the office, I might have 3-12 pure useful tasks ready in my OmniFocus ToDo list. These get actioned
  
  16 hours ago ·
- Graham Hunt Very good Sally I use Evernote for that task because i havent got Omnifocus…. yet!
  
  16 hours ago .
- Sally Church I ♥ OmniFocus – have it on mac and iPad, need to get the iPhone app now. Have a great system going that finally took stuff out of my head and into a system of recording it with reminders. 5* app
  
  15 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme Sally that sounds fantastic although I totally get the meaning and tech use I have no idea what have the tech is that you are talking about
  
  15 hours ago ·
- Sally Church Peter and others interested, check out the following tools:
  
  http://www.topsy.com/
  http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/
  http://ifttt.com/
  http://www.evernote.com/
  
  Once you start using them individually, you can connect them to make the information/data parsing more efficient – imagine a big funnel capturing leads at the top and maybe a dozen useful ones trickling out the bottom daily or weekly for you to follow up on.
  
  Topsy – Real-time search for the social web
  
  topsy.com
  
  Topsy – Real-time search for the social web
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Sally Church Also http://pinboard.in/
  
  a great little bookmarking tool that will also share stuff for late offline read to Instapaper:
  
  http://instapaper.com/
  
  Pinboard: social bookmarking for introverts
  
  pinboard.in
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Peter Syme Many thanks Sally . I wonder what we used to do without all this tech?
  
  5 hours ago ·
- Graham Hunt We didn’t. this allows us to
  
  4 hours ago via Mobile ·