Why are journalists and content producers obsessed with Twitter?
Twitter sends only a trickle of traffic to Priceonomics compared to Facebook, Google Search, and Reddit. But whenever we publish an article, we obsessively check Twitter. Why?
The answer is simple: Twitter gives you instant feedback. It’s a public forum that you can search for mentions of your article and people’s reaction to it.
For writers and marketers, Twitter is an instant dopamine rush: as soon as you create something, you can watch people react and (hopefully) validate it. By contrast, searching for your articles on Facebook reveals nothing because most of the sharing is private.
That’s why Content Tracker, the Priceonomics content dashboard, now integrates with Twitter search to monitor when people mention your article.
Tracker shows who shared or retweeted your article on Twitter, and Tracker even pings you in Slack when someone with a lot of followers shares your article. If Marc Andreessen retweets your article, you’ll know in Slack!
How it works
Content Tracker is software we built at Priceonomics to track and optimize the performance of our articles. Customers of the Priceonomics Data Studio use it as well.
We decided to make it more broadly available, and almost 3,000 companies now use Tracker. It’s free to track up to 20 articles. You should check it out!
Tracker is a dashboard of every article we’ve ever published, and it shows the inbound links, social sharing, conversions, and traffic garnered by each article. You can even A/B test headlines. The the majority of Tracker users are content marketers, but many are traditional publishers as well.
If you enable Twitter integration, Tracker will now obsessively monitor Twitter to see which of your articles are getting mentioned—and by whom.
On your article page summary, you can see who shared your article, how many followers they have, and whether they shared it directly or by retweet. Here’s the Twitter summary for a recent article we published about Trump Hotels.
If you use Slack, Tracker will instantly ping you in Slack with this information. By default, it will only notify you about Twitter users with over 1000 followers. But you can set it to whatever threshold you want. (We have set our threshold at Priceonomics to 3000 followers.)
Thank you for sharing one of our articles a few minutes ago, Kim-Mai Cutler. We noticed!
How to Set It Up
For new users, just sign up here and it will prompt you to enable Twitter integration as part of the signup process.
For people with existing Content Tracker accounts, just follow this link to your account page to turn on Twitter Search API access by authorizing a Twitter account:
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For all its growth woes, Twitter is still a beloved platform for people who write for a living. It’s where journalists hang out and find new information, and since Twitter is a public forum, it shapes national and global conversation. Plus, it’s kind of good for the ego when someone mentions your article on Twitter—especially if they say something nice.
To learn more about Content Tracker, our free content marketing dashboard, check out this article or sign up here.