Reader Christy recently asked me how to get tweets marked with a specific hash tag to appear on her Twitter page. Unfortunately, there's no way to do that because you have to be following someone to have their tweets appear on your timeline and there's nothing to stop someone you don't follow from using that tag.

(If you have no idea what a hash tag is, read my earlier post,
The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?)

For example, I created the #tech4ludds hash tag to mark any posts about this blog. Some of my followers have (kindly) retweeted those posts, so some of THEIR followers would have seen it. One of them may choose to retweet it, or write something related using the tag but, if I don't follow that person, I wouldn't automatically see that tweet on my Twitter home page.

However, if you do want to track all tweets using a particular tag, here are three ways you can do so.

Bookmark search results.

Go to search.twitter.com and do a search on the hash tag.

Now simply add this page to your bookmarks (or favorites, depending on your browser's terminology) and, whenever you go back to it, the page will be updated with the most recent tweets with that tag.

Subscribe to the search results feed.

Instead of bookmarking the page, you can click the Feed for this Query link in the right-hand panel and follow these tweets in your preferred feed reader. If you're not sure how to do that, check out my earlier post, Use a Feed Reader To Keep Up to Date with Your Favorite Blogs.

The advantage of this method, if you're checking your feed reader regularly anyway, you'll find out that there are new tweets, vs. having to remember to check your browser bookmark.

Note: If you're wondering what the Twitter These Results link does, it simply creates a tweet announcing your search. (It doesn't send it until you click the Update button.)

Create a column in TweetDeck.

If you're using TweetDeck as your Twitter client, do a search on the hash tag. The Search button is at the top, seventh from the left, and looks like a magnifying glass.

When you enter your search term, a new column will be created with all the related tweets. Note that it will appear at the very right of TweetDeck, so you may have to scroll over to see it.

The advantage here is that if you're using TweetDeck regularly anyway, you'll be able to see the newest tagged tweets come in right away. The disadvantage is that, depending on your TD settings, you may not have previously viewed tweets appear when you close and restart the app, so you won't have all your related tweets in one place. This could also be affected by the maximum number of tweets you allow per column but, since the default is 500, that will mainly affect only really popular and frequently used tags.

And one more (untested) option.

A friend of mine mentioned that TweetGrid is a popular website that lets you keep track of multiple searches at a time in a variety of grid formats, and each search is updated in real time. So I'm passing it on here in case anyone wants to check it out.

Here's an example of a "2x3" grid they provide. (I put this in quotation marks, because I would actually consider this to be a 3x2 grid, using the width x height standard, but they're using the opposite approach for identifying their grid options.)

I can't provide any more guidance about this option because I took one quick look at it and thought the design was so horrendous, I couldn't stay on it for more than a couple of seconds.

If you know of any other third-party applications, either web-based or for your desktop, or any other approaches to track hash tags (preferably ones that aren't migraine-inducing), please let me know and I'll pass them along.

Posted in Feeds, How To, Reader Questions, Search, TweetDeck, Twitter