Monitoring Twitter via RSS search result feeds

Want to make better use of Twitter, getting a better signal to noise ratio, spotting tweets about things you’re interested in without having to wade through things you’re not?

Use the Twitter search, and enter terms you’re interested in, seperated by OR (e.g. badgers OR mushrooms OR snakes), then hit search – as you’d expect, you’ll find any tweets mentioning any of the terms you mentioned.

Now, in the top right of the results page, is a “Feed for this query” link – this gives you an RSS feed for this search which you can subscribe to in your RSS reader of choice. Now, you have a feed you can monitor for anything that’s of interest for you, whether that be your personal interests, or your company’s brand and terms related to your target market (e.g. hosting OR domains OR ecommerce etc).

Of course, you could just hand-craft the feed URL, if you’d prefer – it will look like:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&q=badgers+OR+mushrooms+OR+snakes

It’s easy enough to change that to whatever you want :)