Twitter tip: Track @mentions and website links in one search

Here’s a simple Twitter tip you can set up in under 30 seconds that will help you better track what people are saying about you and your website.

You already know about the @mentions column in Twitter that shows when people reply to your tweets or mention you.

However, that won’t tell you when people are sharing links to pages on your website without mentioning you in a tweet.

You can set up a single search for both @mentions and links to your website. As an example, I’ll use @BurgWeekly and the-burg.com, which are, respectively, the Twitter account and website for The Burg, a Lynchburg-area arts & entertainment publication.

Go to the Twitter search and enter your Twitter username and your website domain (I recommend leaving out the www), separated by OR:

And here are the results:

You can see a bunch of shared links to The-Burg.com that don’t mention @BurgWeekly.

The best part is, even if the person uses a URL shortener like bit.ly or TinyURL, Twitter will check where the link goes and still include it if it goes to your website.

Now you can click “Save this search” in the upper right of the search results. Then you can pull it up at any time from your searches menu.

If you use HootSuite or Tweetdeck, you can set up a column with this search term to get the same thing. I even removed the default @replies column in my HootSuite and use this instead.

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