DISQUS

David Leonhardt · 1 year ago

Yes, it's that beware that would scare me. I would unfollow anyone who loaded up my home page with Google Alerta on their topics. And do Goole Alerts conform to the 140 character limit? I guess I'll count the characters when they next come in.

John Jantsch · 1 year ago

@David - twitterfeed truncates the abstract and provides a tinyurl like so yes 140, as for the filler up worry, that's not the concern so much, it can be set for once a day with just a link and many people post once hourly, the be aware is that you are linking yourself to automatic content. For instance an alert for "SEO" would turn up good and not so good SEO stories.

Travis · 1 year ago

This would probably be useful if you set up a secondary Twitter account, set it's updates to private, and was the only one that followed it.

SEO Tips South Africa · 1 year ago

The power of the internet just never ceases to amaze me. It is so much more than the sum of its parts and the applications and services are just astounding. The next ten years is sure going to be interesting...everything is getting more and more miniaturised and personal, with the mobile device set to become an all encompassing tool. Twitter serves to connect people on a more personal level, helping break the "isolated box" syndrome of modern society to a degree, or maybe reinforcing it?

John Jantsch · 1 year ago

@Travis and others - I think you are looking at this too narrowly. This doesn't have to be a broad alert that produces mounds of tweets. What about a very laser focused alert term that turns up a weekly nugget and links to the source. That's no different that when people tweet something of interest they stumbled upon. The trick is to be very specific on the alert you point this way.

I don't know what the point of setting up a private twitter account and just sending that which you already can have sent to your RSS reader or email. This is a laser tool not a dump truck.

Young · 1 year ago

Useful but the google alerts often bring me something unexpected.

savings · 1 year ago

Is quiet straightforward as users can create different beeps to get contended results. You can create an alert of your name and nickname. The domain notification can be created to know if someone on twitter is linking your site or blog.

See link http://startupmeme.com/tweetbeep-google-alerts-...

Pete Prestipino · 1 year ago

I'd like to suggest an alternative to streaming every Google alert into Twitter. Since alerts can be received in RSS now, subscribe to the alert feed in Google Reader and select the "Share" option. Use the feed from the Google reader profile for TwitterFeed and you'll be able to designate which items from the feed appear on Twitter (or elsewhere).

John Jantsch · 1 year ago

@Pete - nice filter technique - I've also used the Feedheads application to post updates inside of Facebook in this manner.

Tim Baran · 1 year ago

John, thanks for excellent job covering this topic.
Pete, your comment pinpoints my inquiry, except that I wish to post to a blog (Blogger) rather than Twitter.

I already have an alert with results in Google Reader and can create a gadget (acts as a news feed) and post to my blog, but can't quite figure out how to filter using the technique you mentioned.
Please extrapolate if you can?

Thanks!!

Greg · 8 months ago

Thanks for the article. I did this and the feed goes to my status on twitter. I just want a direct message with the info. Is that possible??

MrGoogleAlerts · 7 months ago

It is the unfiltered aspect that is dangerous. I have done a lot of research on this and I think the best strategy is to set up a separate alert account at Twitter. You can identify this as the result of Google Alerts, and make it available as a resource. That way you aren't identified as the direct source of the tweets. You don't want to hide your involvement, but you do want to make it clear that these are autotweets. I have been running a test on an auto-tweet account based on Google Alerts with very positive results. You can get the details on my blog:

http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/06...

I think the key is full disclosure of the source. Once you establish the account, and have followers who have opted in, you can add your own tweets with whatever message you choose. As long as you are transparent, this seems completely ethical. It isn't spam, because you aren't doing any following. You are just allowing others to choose to follow you.