Last week along with my colleage Tim Bond I ran some experiments in trying to automatically create lists of people who talk about certain topics on Twitter, then to analyse the topics of conversation they use. This could potentially help in campaign planning or strategy formulation.
Using If This Then That, you're able to create 'IFs' that are RSS feeds. And Twitter still supports search results through RSS. So this is the first step; to choose the search terms you want (Tim and I went for Jeremy Kyle just because he was trending on Twitter at the time... more on the importance of that search term later!). I've shared my IFTTT recipies so you can see exactly how this works (incidentally since I shared the list 4 days ago it has been used by 26 other people on IFTTT, see below).
Then for your 'That' choose Twitter as an output, and specifically the Lists output. There are two ways to set it up, I've shared both over on If This Then That. One creates lists of people talking about your topic, the other creates lists of people mentioned in the same tweet as your topic.
What you can then do is run topic analysis on these lists to see what the trending topics are for example - probably not for Jeremy Kyle, instead go with whatever your brand, product or project might be. This would give you some really useful insights. And lists, when public, are shareable so colleagues can follow your new shiny creations.
So what happened when several hundred people got added to my Twitter lists because of a mention of Jeremy Kyle? About one in 100 people got a bit grumpy with me, both male, and both in the early hours of the morning. Here are their tweets :)
Lessons learned: if you're going to be auto-adding people to public lists, label the lists clearly and expect a little feedback if you pick a topic of the kind that I chose.
Later I will post some conversation analysis from these lists, stay tuned!
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