How To: Monitor Twitter Using Twilert

I wrote a post about Google Alerts a couple years ago and how important it is to keep up with what’s being said about your organization online. Well, things were a bit simpler back in early ’08, before Twitter’s growth exploded and back when Facebook had around 75 million members (there are now more than half a billion people on Facebook).

Now, with the huge expansion of Facebook and Twitter users, not to mention Location Based networks and the continued importance of blogging, Google Alerts does a pretty good job of grabbing content from blogs and websites, but they haven’t quite nailed real-time streams such as Twitter yet.

That’s where a service like Twilert comes in. Twilert is a service that allows you to set up Twitter Alerts to be sent to you on a regular basis for any number of search terms. You can set up fairly broad searches, but you can also narrow down your search for very specific terms and even geographically target which Tweets to look at. This is extremely helpful for local businesses or for other organizations that only need to see tweets sent in their area.

Here’s a short screencast that shows how to get started with Twilert:

Do you use Twilert or another keyword alert system? More importantly, what do you do with these alerts when you get them?