Twitip

by Steve Broback founder of 140: The Twitter Conference – Follow him @sbroback

Most businesses who are trying to stay on top of what’s being said about them (or their competition) are very familiar with Twitter’s standard search engine. Search.twitter.com will provide a reasonably comprehensive set of results for term and hashtag references, but that may not be enough for businesses who need to stay on top of all relevant conversations.

One shortcoming of Twitter’s standard search is that it will fail to catch those tweets that may have linked to your/your competition’s site, yet don’t contain the specific terms or tags that you are probing for.

Imagine that someone has tweeted only the words “my favorite latte” and has provided a link to the coffee house you own. In this instance no key terms were used, and you’d likely never know that the reference ever existed.

Enter Backtweets. With Backtweets, you simply enter a URL (the service will auto-resolve shortened ones) into the single field presented and hit return. It will deliver a reverse-chronological list of tweets containing the requested link.

In addition, it provides an RSS feed so that you can be notified automatically as new relevant tweets appear. If you would prefer to receive the updates via email, one option is to enter the feed URL into a service such as FeedMyEmail, who will send you a daily email.

The creators of Backtweets tell me that service will provide up to 500 results for any single search result at one time, and searches for links going back about 2 months.

(Click the image for a larger view.)

Our sentiment is that Backtweets is an invaluable addition to the toolkit of any professional who needs to stay on top what’s being said on Twitter.