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auto-tweet

Best practices for automatic posting of Google Alerts to Twitter

by Adam Green on July 6, 2009

in AlertRank, Announcements, Autotweet, Google Alerts, Marketing, Public accounts, Reputation management, SEO, Twitter

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.

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  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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Promote your brand on Twitter with AlertRank Autotweets

by Adam Green on March 31, 2009

in AlertRank, Announcements, Google Alerts, SEO, Twitter

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.

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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.

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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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