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.

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.

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.

Google Alerts was in the title and text, so Google picked it up and sent it out as an alert at 11:43. My AlertRank account picked it up right away, since I monitor all mentions of Google Alerts with, um, Google Alerts. Wait, it get’s more self-referential later.

I have auto-tweeting set on this account, which tweets 5 of my alerts each hour to a Twitter account called @Marketing_Alert. This showed up on Twitter within a minute of arriving at AlertRank.

I also monitor mentions of Google Alerts on Twitter in real-time with TweetDeck. I have a search for google (alert OR alerts). This search immediately picked up the alert about my blog post, which had been sent to AlertRank, which then sent it to Twitter. So I ended up seeing this alert in Tweetdeck.

What can we make of all this frantic, automatic activity? For one thing, Google Alerts is able to pick up a blog post and deliver it in a few hours. Is that real-time? Of course not, but if you complement Google Alerts with Twitter, you can build a highly efficient monitoring system. And if you retweet your alerts, you can reach those who want real-time response.

There is just one problem. Google Alerts is going to pick up this new post, and send it to AlertRank, which will send it to Twitter, which will send it to TweetDeck. I think I need to take a break and go out and do some gardening.