Finding the Relevant Engineering Tweets
Over in the comments section of an EE Times article about their Twitter survey, there’s a well-balanced debate around “why engineers don’t like Twitter.”
Aside from the usual concerns around exposing sensitive information and wasting valuable time, what I generally look for in these discussions are the complaints from people who can’t find discussions pertinent to engineers. Instead of finding tweets around PCB design or FPGA software, these folks only see more personal updates on what people had for lunch or the latest blockbuster movie.
One of my favorite things to do is show engineering friends how they can bypass all of that mainstream chatter and get to the tweets that matter to them. And maybe get to know some of the people behind them. (There are more engineers on Twitter than you think; they’re just often more subtle in their bios than the “social media gurus.”)
What engineers should try doing is regularly monitoring the technology terms and brands they care about, bypassing all the tweets about which Chipotle someone just took over on Foursquare.
One simple way to focus on the terms you care about is visiting search.twitter.com. I like to stay on top of discussions around FPGAs.
Sure, there are some job postings and repetitive links to FPGA vendor news releases, but I also find substantive discussions around the technology by real engineers.
Challenge is, visiting search.twitter.com every time you want to stay on top of technology is rather time-consuming. It’s often easier to use some tools out there for monitoring Twitter.
Several tools exist for staying on top of relevant discussions in micro-blogging services. Often referred to as social media monitoring services, these tools can run you a few hundred dollars per month! For free, you can run a simple search at search.twitter.com on technology keywords, product names, vendor brands or what-have-you. Then create an RSS feed (see the upper-right-hand corner of the search page on Twitter) for each term that you want to put in your RSS reader.
You can then check your RSS feed reader — I use Google Reader — to find conversations popping up daily. It’s amazing how many relevant discussions you find, when you’re very disciplined about checking the feeds.
So what do you do if you haven’t used RSS feeds from Twitter but you want to discover a conversation about, say, a “PCB board” right now? Well, you may not find anyone talking about a PCB board on Twitter if all the conversations are a couple weeks old. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land explains, “an index can run out of room.”
For older tweets (but only back to Feb. 2010), you can use Google. Search Google for “FPGA” and you’ll find all kinds of results.
Now, see where it says “More” on the left-hand side of the screen? Click that. There, you’ll see the option to see “Updates.” Those are Twitter updates, reaching all the way back to February. (I remember that month fondly: We had more sun in Portland than in the month of June…)
How cool is that? You wouldn’t believe how many people — even Twitter addicts — don’t know about this Twitter search feature from Google.
Hopefully, monitoring approaches such as the above will help people in the electronics industry — and anybody, really — pinpoint those discussions on Twitter that they’d really care about.
Let me know if not.
Tags: EE Times, engineers, monitoring, social media, Twitter