Managing your Tweets

Posted by Gabe on August 5, 2009 under Ask Gabe, Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 4 Comments to Read

This is the second in the Ask Gabe series.  A very good question came back to me posed by @DaveWebbBC:

@KidsAreHeroes Hi Im new to twitter, how do you manage conversations in the midst of 100s of tweets from random people?

Ok Dave, there are two parts to this.  By your tweet I see you have learned to preface your tweet with the @ sign followed by the intended Twitter ID.  This is the proper way to do this.  I received this in my Replies/Mentions folder (as do you when you get tweets directed at you).  Many newbies don’t see this folder.  When you open Twitter from your browser, on the right sidebar you see “Home”. Underneath that you see your Twitter ID and under that is the Direct Messages folder.  Click on your Twitter ID and you will see only tweets that are either directed at you or mention you in the tweet.  What may be confusing is that you also see them in your main Twitter stream.  So the basic answer is to check your Replies/Mentions folder – this will be separate from your main stream that has all those other random tweets.

Now once you get a little more comfortable and daring, you can install a product such as Tweetdeck that provides columns for different folders.  Your Replies/Mentions folder is viewable at the same time as your main Twitter stream.  You can even see your direct messages concurrently as well.  And the nice thing about Tweetdeck is that it automatically refreshes itself, wheras you keep having to manually refresh your browser to see new tweets.

Now, one problem occurs when you get a response from someone who you directed a question quite some time ago and you can’t remember what you asked.  Or maybe you just commented on something they said.  They come back to you days later assuming you had just asked the question.  That happened to me yesterday.  There are a number of ways to do this, but the only tool I could find that worked properly was TweeTree.  This tool shows the threads in conversations.  Go to Tweetree.com and log in to Twitter.  Look at your Mentions folder. You should see the conversations that you have been having. 

Now there should be two other resources that can help. Specifically Advanced Twitter Search and TweetGrid.com. You can add boolean operators to Tweetgrid – for example to see conversations between you and me enter:  DaveWebbBC AND KidsAreHeroes  – note the capitalized AND.  Unfortunately this isn’t working now in either case.  I think that both use the Twitter Search API and my guess is that something is wrong with it at the time of this writing.  I was unable to find the tweets from @DaveWebbBC to @KidsAreHeroes.  If this works for someone else or if someone knows something I don’t please enlighten. UPDATE: As I suspected, at least according to this post, the Twitter search engine is indeed broken. That’s probably why it is no longer available directly from their home page.  What you were trying to do will be much simpler once it is fixed.

UPDATE 8/25/09: I was working with the aforementioned tool Tweetdeck just now and I tripped over something that is definitely related to this.  Tweetdeck has different columns that you can set up.  One is the Mentions/Replies column.  As I stated it will automatically update according to how often you have it set and you can see other tweets as well.  If you get a reply (as opposed to just a mention), there will be text at the bottom of the tweet that will say “..in reply to..”.  If you click on that it will show you the conversation you had with that person.  I just discovered it so I have yet to determine its real value, but it seems like it might be very helpful.

UPDATE 8/6/09: I saw this link today for Twitter Conversation and Communication Tools.  Looks like there are several more tools to help. Haven’t tried them all, so when I do I will come back and update again.  Here is the link.

Hope all this helps… :)