AlertRank just added the ability to automatically send selected Google Alerts to a Twitter account. There are other tools that will take a Google Alerts RSS feed and turn it into Twitter messages, but AlertRank has the advantage of letting you add a filter so that just the alerts from the most influential sites appear. You can also choose which of your alerts are used based on their search term. To make sure you don’t flood your Twitter account, you can specify a maximum number of tweets per hour and per day.
The tweets appear with the headline from the Google Alert, and a TinyURL for the alert’s web page. You can also add a set of hashtags to the end of each tweet. For this demonstration I added #test to each message.
Why would you want to auto-tweet your Google Alerts? It is a great way of generating a steady flow of content that will gain you followers interested in specific keywords. As a test of this new feature, I turned on auto-tweeting to an account that is only following 1 person and has no icon, so it’s not a real person. Within 2 hours it got 5 more followers.
Another real benefit of this technique is the added SEO juice this gives your Twitter account. Google is now indexing tweets, and Twitter is making changes to improve the search visibility of their pages. This type of steady stream of content can make your Twitter page authoritative for people searching for your keywords.
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Excellent info and much appreciated!
great idea–I’m currently running google alerts thro’ yahoo pipes to wp blog then out to twitter and facebook–works fine
But if I want to start a new project to see what sort of reaction I could get this is a quick and easy way to do it.
please let me know when free version is out–I never pay for anything that I have not tried out thoroughly