I have a special affinity for open source tools and how they can be used for protective services professionals. I’m always testing the common social media tools that most businesses use for customer engagement, brand and competitive monitoring and applying them with a intelligence mindset. I have done videos and podcasts about the tools I have tested.
Back in 2013 I was able to get my hands on some coding that enabled me to set up specific Twitter searches using the V1 of the streaming API and embed the results on a WordPress page. I separated each search code into columns on the page and the feed rolled in continuously with having to refresh the page. All very nice. Until Twitter closed later that year. Twitter announced V1.1 of the Rest API – no more streaming unlimited.
In the same year Twitter announced embedded Timelines. Most businesses applied them to their blogs to encourage follows and engagement. Timelines can feature:
- Search (simple and advanced),
- Favorites of any public user,
- Any public users timeline,
- Any list of users, and
- Collections – timelines curated by users.
Twitter does not put rates and limits on Widget Timelines which is great for those who need real time data.
Last year I began playing around the search components. I would create the search in Twitter’s advanced search using Any of these Words, and geolocating those keywords within a certain radius in the city where I live. Not a very lively city for Twitter so the tweets trickled in. But it worked very nicely without having to refresh the page.
But who wants to stare at a web page all day waiting for the tweets come in? Especially if you are a solo practitioner who is always on the move.
Which leads me to this week where I followed Alice down the rabbit hole to try create real time email alerts for a specific search keyword from tweets using the Twitter widget.
Step 1. Convert Twitter widget into an RSS feed
This by far was the easiest step. A very knowledgeable gent created and published for free a google app that will transform your Twitter widget into an RSS feed.
Step 2. Take the RSS feed and Push to Email
There were two options that I took to test how quickly I would get an email alert. Option one was IFTTT (or IF This, Then That). A fun resource with a simple interface that creates “recipes” to does all the hard work for you. My recipe was if Twitter widget RSS feed has a new item, then send it to my Gmail account.
Option Two was a newcomer to me – Zapier. Zapier for this test was much more feature rich in that it gave you additional options to bring in metadata from the twitter feed.
After monitoring the times of the delivery of the emails over several days comparing it to the baseline widget, the times were near time pretty consistently within 2 to 3 minutes.
