How To Track Your Retweets In Twitter (Pt.1)
a. Meet like-minded people
Either retweet out of kindness or simply loving the content, this guy/lady might be somebody worth following, befriends with. We could show our appreciation by giving thanks, repaying kindness, following each others’ tweets… usually that’s how the networking begins.b. How popular/unique is our tweet
how far it could go via retweet — the clicks, stats and the performance. Is the title catchy enough? Shall we do a sequel for the post? How is our twithority? Time to evaluate your twitter experience.
How To Track Retweets ?
You could try ReTweet Rank that shows both of your current ranking along with retweet history, but only limited to the keywords ‘RT‘ & ‘your username‘. What if people retweet using the word ‘via’? Untraceable.
Some people may or may not address our username when they retweet. Great tools are on the queue to track them all:
1. Backtweets – Link search engine that leads you to people who retweet
Enables URL-tracking for a particular link. Neither registration nor Login required. However, to get the most out of Backtweets, you need to:
“Make sure to paste in the complete URL for your link. This is to enable tracking for various shortened-URL, such as tinyurl, is.gd, bit.ly etc that originated from the link”, as shown below:
Ok, now you may want to know…
“WHAT IF I Search By…”
Q1: My own blog URL? say, ‘https://wchingya.com’,
Results:
Random results will be flooding in, not only for the recent one, but including previous tweets or whenever your blog URL is mentioned.Q2: My very own shortened URL. For Instance, ‘How To Personalize your Twitter Background‘ was using ~ http://tr.im/iYvr
Results: ‘There are no tweet results’. I know, I’m just as surprised.
Q3: How about ‘post title’?
Results: Nothing.
Q4: Apparently, it only works for complete URL-tracking then?
Results:
Not quite, here’s why:Let’s say I wish to trace 1 previous post of mine : The Reveal: Killer Apps for A Successful Twitter Network (pt2). I’m only using part of the keyword search “Killer Apps To Enhance Twitter Network”, what do I get?
Surprisingly, somebody tweeted this post from Digg, and the keywords used are coincidently the same for article submission in Digg. What if I use the exact post title? It returns with zero results.Seems like there’s not fixed rule of ‘no keywords’ allowed. However, Backtype Founder, Christopher Golda explains that the keyword search would only direct you to the unshortened link URLs containing the keywords. Backtweets still stands as a link search engine.
Downside of Backtweets:
Not all shortened URLs are traceable. For example, Backtweets is unable to detect twitclicks, another URL–shortener service with stats available. We’ll be discussing more about this service shortly.
4 results (no twitclicks detected)
showing extra 2 results for twitclicks
In the coming post, we will be covering part 2 of the Retweet-trackers. If you happen to enjoy this post, do subscribe via RSS Feed or email so you won’t miss it. No pressure, you can unsubscribe anytime if you find it disturbing. ^^
Copyright © 2009 by Wong Ching Ya, All Rights Reserved, “‘How To Track Your Retweet In Twitter (Pt.1)“
BackTweets is a link search engine for Twitter. If you want to search keywords, you should use Twitter Search; you can search for keywords on BackTweets, but it will look for those keywords in URLs. Currently, we cover the majority of widely used URL shorteners — we’ll add twitclicks asap.
Hi Christopher,
Thank you for clearing that up. Now that makes sense.
That’s good news, looking forward to the twitclicks ad-ons. BackTweets is still one of the best link search engine I’ve seen so far. You guys did a pretty good job with it.
Will amend the content for the ‘keyword’ part. ^^
Hey Ching Ya ,
Thanks for this wonderful post .It has helped me a lot in back searching people tweets for sure .
Regards
Sudeep
Hi Sudeep,
Thank you so much for the visit. It’s a pleasure to have you around. Yes, indeed it’s exciting to check on the links. I just did and added some new contacts due to it. ^^
Glad you like it. Stay tuned for the coming retweet trackers. Have a nice weekend.
I’ve never used this tool but may use for tracking some good posts. Fortunately, backtweets supports all major URL shorteners.
Hi Rajeev,
You’re right. Not expecting Backtweets to be completely perfect, but it’s 90% close to tracking most of the url shorteners we know.
Since the results are in real-time format, it would based on the consistency and how far the retweet could go. Once the link-sharing stops for that RT after sometimes, it would be off the twitter radar as well. Maybe after Twitter starts indexing links for its search, yes, it just might happen: http://bit.ly/ux7Ql
Twitter is a new world to me, as I am sure it is for other clueless people. When I am trying to understand its use and sudden popularity, posts like this help me immensely.
Thank you so much for writing this as I had no idea you could track retweets. Twitter appears to have more features than I thought at the beginning.
Hi Susan,
Welcome and great to have you here.
Indeed. I believe every social media tool has the potential of growing and reaching wider crowds. Twitter sure serves well in this purpose, and some 3rd party apps really show great potentials in helping us to enhance our network. The idea is to optimize the usage.
Hope to seeing you again sometimes. Feel free to drop by or email me anytime. ^^ Take care.
I’m still trying to get to grips with Twitter. I find I don’t have enough time to dedicate to it. Think its going to take me a LOOOONNNNGGGG time to know what I am doing on it!
Very useful reading your posts though!!
Welcome Silvia, it’s a pleasure to have you here. ^^
The feeling is mutual: Tons of social media but so little time to understand and get involved in them. However,IMHO, bloggers should try at least one type of social networking as it’ll help in the long run, either in our writing, gaining readership, or better–the friendship that blossoms from the networking. =)
Thank you so much for your comment. Hope to see you again soon.
There posts are really helpful.
Dear Chingya,
It is amazing to me that you know all this and share it in such a beautiful presentation.
Did you play guitar today??
xo
Hello Salute & Jannie,
Thank you guys so much for spending some times here and willing to drop a few words. ^^
P/S: Thanks for the reminder Jannie, oh yes, I'm gonna do so when I got back from work. Gonna try Daughtry's new song. ^^
Those are interesting tools. I’m especially curious how close the Tweetmeme plugin count will be to those backward links counters.
~ Kristi
Kikolani,
I’m not sure who’s faster, more accurate, etc – but it’s easy enough to do some comparisons. Whenever you see the Tweetmeme count, just check the URL on BackTweets. We strive to get every single linked tweet with very little delay.
Thanks for your comment!
Hi Kristy,
Thank you for visiting. Pleasure to have you.
Good question. Actually I did several testings this morning, seems to me both Tweetmeme & Backtweets have quite similar counts most of the time. Unsure which is more acurate though.
Perhaps Christopher could feedback to your question shortly.
Another great post that I’ll be sure to RT for you. 😉
Dear Rose,
Thank you so much for dropping by, and I truly appreciate your kindness. ^^
How on earth do you know all this stuff? I'm still trying to figure out how to use Twitter for the basics!
Hi Terri,
I think curiosity do me much favors into hours/days of digging. I just got curious on how we could use Twitter more efficiently in our blogs, especially making it a stat-tracker or some sort.
Great to know you're joining Twitter! Hope to see you there more often. If you got any inquiries, I'll be glad to help out if possible. =)
Very good analysis Ching Ya. Also very beneficial for to track Re-tweets.
Thanks for Sharing.
.-= techprism´s last blog ..Win Copies of Chetan Bhagat’s Latest Book “2 States” | Giveaway from Inforids =-.
Techprism,
Thank you for noticing one of my old posts. ^^
I’m glad you like the idea of tracking RTs. So far it has helped me a lot in my networking.
Thanks for this and other articles on Twitter Ching Ya,
A whole new world has just opened up for me and I am using several methods you suggested for monitoring.
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