Recently I’ve been relying more and more on social networking sites like Twitter to communicate with people and get answers to questions. I’ve even learned about a some useful tools that have helped me with Internet marketing.
But as great as Twitter is there are times when it’s left me hanging when it comes to tracking replies. Not everyone on Twitter replies instantly to your Tweets and that means you can miss replies that come in minutes or hours later.
If you’re gonna build relationships on social networks you have to be responsive. Until now it’s been a problem for me on Twitter. I tried using TweetBeep to track Twitter messages, but it just didn’t catch all the messages to keep me on top of things. But thanks to a tip from @BradMcFadden at FishWitz I now know of a great way to track Twitter replies.
RyanK from TweetTrak has created a bot that converts your Twitter replies to direct messages. If you have SMS turned on for direct messages you’ll receive a text message each time someone replies to you on Twitter. It’s a great way to track Twitter replies using SMS.
2. Send a direct message to tweettrak: ‘track @RyanK’ (substituting your username, or any other search term)
3. Enjoy track functionality!
4. Tweet about it and tell your friends!
According to @RyanK, the TweetTrak website is suppose to be coming soon and it will allow you to filter out people you already have device notifications turn on for.
6 Comments
Thanks for the blog post!
Its always good to see people liking my little project enough to write about it! And there’s a lot more in the works too!
RyanK
Posted on September 30th, 2008 at 5:51 am
RyanK, My pleasure for sure. We are all the benefactors of innovation. I especially like solutions that fill the gaps when systems or organizations leave them unfilled. Twitter would do well to add your solutions to their offering.
Do you have any other tricks in the works?
Posted on September 30th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Now you’re trying to kill my phone bill… Geez!
Another good suggestion is twhirl. It holds a ton of tweets (days worth, if you’re online that long) so it’s easy to scroll back and keep up
Posted on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Jerry,
I really like TweetDeck. Because it uses Adobe Air, it works on Windows and Mac. I like the ability to search by keyword and have multiple views of conversations. I was using SMS at first to stay connected, but that was before I started using Twitterlator on my iPhone. Now I’m pretty much connected all the time. But, I agree. Unless you have unlimited text messaging, sms can be problematic.
Posted on October 5th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I’m wondering if this might help solve the problem USCellular users have where all @replies come thru to phones blank… anything after an @ sent in a tweet gets lopped off (including the @)… so you essentially know someone replied, but not what they said or to whom!
i’m signing up, and if this patches that, I’ll be TICKLED!!!!
Posted on October 6th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Julie. That’s an interesting problem and a potentially creative solution. Please let me know if this is a good work around for you. It might help someone else too.
Posted on October 6th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
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