From the category archives:

Autotweet

Auto-tweeting of Google Alerts has become one of the most popular features in AlertRank, and now that AlertRank accounts are free these auto-tweets are popping up everywhere. We’ve added lots of controls that let you fine tune your auto-tweeting, and I wanted to point these out.

Let’s take the public Google Alerts account I created for the food author Michael Pollan as an example. These alerts are sent to a Twitter account, and have generated a good list of followers. The auto-twitter page for this account on AlertRank shows you the different ways you can control which alerts are tweeted.

auto-tweet

  1. Add a hashtag to the end of each tweet to help people find it with a Twitter search tool. You can add as much text as you want here, and AlertRank will automatically trim the alert to make sure the total tweet is within 140 characters.
  2. Use the AlertRank quality score to control the importance of the alerts you tweet. The AlertRank score is based on Google PageRank and a collection of other influence factors. The higher the AlertRank, the more influential the source of the alert is.
  3. Select the search terms to include in your tweets. You can collect alerts from up to 1,000 search terms in a single AlertRank account, but you can limit the tweets to just the terms you want.
  4. Restrict tweets to those alerts with the right page features. For example, if you want to only tweet alerts that allows comments or trackbacks, you can set these options on. That gives you a set of tweets that are suited for a blog outreach campaign.
  5. Depending on the amount of alerts you get in your account, you can restrict the number of tweets to a maximum per hour and per day.

The best part is that all of this tweeting is automatic. Since the accounts on AlertRank are free, you can create multiple accounts, each with their own search terms and levels of auto-tweeting control.

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I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, because we’ve been making a lot of changes to the company and sites. The first big change is turning AlertRank into a free site. The site still supports up to 1,000 search terms per account, and you are free to create any number of accounts. Alerts are delivered by email with a full set of ranking information as soon as they are received from Google, and you can also get them summarized daily in Excel or PDF format. My favorite feature is auto-tweeting the highest ranked alerts to Twitter. Since you can create multiple AlertRank accounts, you can have different Google Alerts search terms go to different Twitter accounts. It is a great marketing tool.

We have a lot of improvements planned for AlertRank, and even though it is free, it will continue to grow in response to user requests. So check it out, and let me know if you want anything else added.

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Watching the full “lifecycle” of a Google Alert

April 26, 2009

I know that some people find Google Alerts to be slow, but let me share an example of how well it can work. I posted on Google Alerts for Swine flu this morning at 9:05 ET.

Google Alerts was in the title and text, so Google picked it up and sent it out as an alert [...]

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