Burning Questions about Twitter: Answered!

Bonggamom says there are Things About Twitter I’d Like to Know. Since one person’s questions are usually lurking in the minds of others, I thought the answers might be helpful to share.

Bonggamom’s first question is “Is there anywhere in the blogosphere that lists down upcoming Twitter parties?” The answer is yes, with limits. Many Twitter meetups are organized through Twitter.Meetup.com. If you don’t find one near you, then use Meetup to start your own. Meetups are also organized and run through Twitmit. Twitmit meetups are scheduled via Twitter, Facebook and by email. Both of these tools allow you to search for meetups by location.

Bonggamom asks, “Does anyone know of any twitter tool that counts how many tweets occurred with a certain hashtag between a specific start and end date?” A number of solutions I found suggested (but not implemented) for this idea involved using the Twitter API to glean your information. I think Bonggamom is looking for someone who’s already done that part. Tweetreach can do the job, including meeting the requirement to limit the data to certain dates. SWIX tracks Twitter data. SWIX is a complete social media tracking tool—and not free. (I’ll be writing more about it next week. You know the drill—stay tuned.)

For the mobile user, Bonggamom wants to know, “If you don’t have a smart phone, what are some good Twitter apps to use?” NOT a smart phone. Ouch, that’s a hard one. But doable, according to The Best Mobile Applications for Twitter.

Just associate your Twitter account with Posterous and then you’ll be able to post updates on Twitter by sending emails to twitter@posterous.com. Whatever you put in the email subject will be converted into your Twitter status.

According to 20 ways to use Twitter from your mobile phone, any phone with SMS capability can use Twitter.

First see: How to activate your phone for Twitter

Then text your update to:

• In the US, use 40404.
• In Canada, use 21212.
• In India, use 5566511.
• Anywhere else, use +44 7624 801423

Bonggamom wants to know, “How do you insert all those special characters like notes and hearts and smileys into your tweets?” Like these . . .

I use Twhirl by Seesmic on my desktop, and there are special characters in the Edit menu. For using Twitter in your browser, Next Web has a bookmarklet that provides special characters. Twitter Symbols is also a browser bookmarklet. You can add on the Greasemonkey scripts to Firefox, specifically the Tweetsymbols script, which allows you to drag symbols in to your Tweet input box. I looked around in the Twitterific app I use for Twitter on my iPhone and couldn’t find a way to insert special characters there.

Next, Bonggamom is burning to know, “Is there any tool around for effectively managing your Twitter followers, i.e. be able to sort them alphabetically, by age, by location, be able to search for a specific follower, etc?” I couldn’t find any online way to sort followers aphabetically. Like Bonggamom, I wish there was a way to do this. I find it really hard to search among my followers when I’m looking for someone in particular whose Twitter name I’m not 100% sure I remember correctly. It’s much faster to use Twitter’s Find People search and look for their name.

Foller.me will put all your followers’ locations on a Google map. You can search your follower’s bios with TweepSearch. Many bios mention location. A bio search might reveal age, but I don’t often see age mentioned in many Twitter profiles.

It was fun for me to find all this information. To Bonggamom, I can only say thanks for asking.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.