How To Set Up Twitter RSS Feeds That Will Grow Your Business

TweetI read a great tweet from Gill Wagner (@honestselling) the other day — it was something to the effect of “Twitter is not a contest. It is a conversation.”

Aint that the truth.  You should be spending most of your time on Twitter listening.

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Your prospects, customers, competitors and colleagues are sending little 140 character messages out on Twitter every day.

I know… I know… reading all those tweets  is liking trying to take a sip from a water hose.

Some use a desktop application like Tweetdeck to manage their Twitter feed and I use this as well.  However, I have found that this method is much more convenient once it is set up.  I can access my RSS reader from anywhere and I sometimes find a program like Tweetdeck to be unreliable in managing multiple conversations.

How To Follow The Tweets That Will Grow Your Business

Follow this procedure and you will start to separate the good from the bad and the ugly in your Twitter Feed.

1.  Set up an RSS reader on Netvibes.  Watch this video tutorial for step by step instructions.

2.  Go to Twitter Search

3.  Click on “Advanced Search”

4.  Type in some keywords that you want to follow

Examples:

For a Restaurant in St. Louis  >>>  stl restaurant

For an IT Consultant >>> erp system

For an author >>> book publisher

etc, etc.

5.  You can also filter your search by a particular person, by particular dates or by particular locations.

6.  Ok, now hit search and go back and refine your search if need be.

7.  Now you need to grab the RSS feed for that search. Click on the “Feed For This Query” link

8.  Copy that long URL from the address bar of your browser that is located on the feed page.  Yours will be different from the image below but will be just as long and ugly.

9.  Now open your Netvibes Reader and click on “Add Content”

10.  Click on “Add a Feed”

11.  Paste that big old URL into the open box and click on “Add Feed”

12.  When it finds the feed click on “Add”

Voila!  Now repeat until you have a set of RSS feeds that are following the conversations on Twitter that can build your business.  Follow those that are talking about things that are important to your business.

And — most importantly make sure you are listening and commenting on the conversations that are important to your business and industry.