Lawyers e-Journal
Thursday, Jul. 12, 2012
Law Practice Management Tip
Searching Twitter
Twitter can be a great tool to find useful information.
Professionals commonly use Twitter to share developments in a
particular field, discuss a new service offering or highlight an
interesting case. Unfortunately, Twitter does not organize tweets
by subject matter, so finding information on a discreet topic can
be difficult. Rather than reading hundreds of tweets to find
information on a particular topic, you can use Twitter's search
tools to find exactly the information you want.
A basic search is simple. You pick search terms and type them
into Twitter's
search box. For example, if you are interested in whether
tweets can be subpoenaed in litigation you could search for
"subpoenaed" and "tweets." The results contain both terms. If you
have misspelled a word, Twitter will suggest a corrected option
with the search results. These suggested corrections are NOT as
comprehensive as those on search engines and appear to only correct
some words, such as celebrity names, so type carefully.
Twitter's
Advanced Search offers tools to refine your basic search. For
example, you can search for an exact phrase, specify words that
should NOT be in the results, search for tweets to or from a
particular Twitter account, or search for tweets originating from a
particular city (called the "Near this place" option). A full list
of advanced search operators is
here.
You can combine the Advanced Search options to deliver more
specific results. If you want to find Boston Twitter users
discussing whether tweets can be subpoenaed in litigation, you can
add the "Near this place" option to the sample search above to find
Twitter users within 25 miles of Boston using the words
"subpoenaed" and "tweets" in a tweet. Or, if you want to determine
what a particular Twitter user has been saying about a topic, you
can combine the option for tweets from a user (called "From these
accounts") with a search term. Thus, you could search for tweets
from @jaredcorreia containing the word "marketing" to get Jared
Correia's latest tweets on the topic of marketing.
Advanced Search also allows you to search by hashtag. Hashtags
are dedicated words or phrases preceded by the "#" symbol (without
quotation marks). A Twitter user labels his or her tweet with a
hashtag to identify the tweet as related to the subject of the
hashtag. For example, the hashtag for LOMAP's recent Super Marketing
Conference II was: #superconf. Any tweet containing #superconf,
regardless of the words used in the tweet, related to the
conference. A recent MBA LPM Tip covering how to filter and archive
Twitter posts by hashtag can be found
here.
You can also search for tweets via a search engine know as Ice Rocket. Ice Rocket's
specialty is real-time search of Twitter and other sources. When
reviewing Ice Rocket's Twitter results, you can hover over a
Twitter user's profile picture to see a snapshot of that Twitter
user including their location, number of followers and tweets,
etc.
Use these search tools to find exactly what you seek on
Twitter.
Tip courtesy of Scott L. Malouf (@ScottMalouf),
Law Office
Management Assistance Program (@MassLOMAP).
Published July 12, 2012
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To learn more about the Law Practice Management
Section, which is complimentary for all MBA members,
contact LPM Section Chair Thomas J. Barbar or Vice
Chair Stephen
Seckler.