Automating your social media and twitter intelligence tool process with a tool like Twilert will save your team incredible amount of time, effort, and resources. It pays for itself nearly instantly.

Benjamin Brown – Director of Growth, Twilert

Twitter has become an amazing intelligence tool for conflict journalists, investigators, and analysts The breadth of discussion and the number of users allows interested parties to pinpoint exactly where public intelligence events are occurring. Using a twitter intelligence tool allows users to automate the process of intelligence gathering on social media. With the right social media intelligence toolset, you will be able to make rapid decisions in fast-paced environments.

Searching Twitter for Intelligence Leads

The most basic form of social media intelligence research utilizing Twitter is the basic twitter search. Enter your terms, or trending crisis-related hashtags, and you’ll get recent tweets related to your search criteria. This is the original value proposition of Twitter for journalists or investigators, but the problem with manually searches is that you have to be in front of your computer or phone and search every single time you want updated data.

Setting up Your Twitter Intelligence Tool

The second era of intelligence tools was introduced with Twitter Alerts provided by Twitter. Users can set up SMS alerts to come to a mobile phone whenever a term or hashtag is posted to the social media platform.

Again, the issue here is that you’re only getting a limited amount of tweets – and you may miss some tweets that are out of bounds of standard Twitter alerts.

“I work in executive protection and have been using Twilert for approx. 4 months. I use your service primarily for on the ground real time intel. I have a limited budget and find your service to be a reasonable alternative to the high dollar (HD) services (Data Miner, NC4). The High Dollar services use similar API’s only they employ the use of analyst to sort out the pertinent data.

Reviewing the data, myself is time consuming but has given me great results. In a couple cases I was able to send an alert to some of colleagues, in the Executive Protection world, who use the High Dollar Services and my alert actually came to them first. “

– Greg B 

Monitoring Twitter for Intelligence Data

Setting up twitter alerts for intelligence events is great, but the ultimate goal is to have events coming to your inbox when they occur – essentially automating the intelligence discovery process to provide only the data that is relevant.

You will want to geo-target an area to filter out the activity that is not relevant to yours. Next, you’ll want to use advanced search terms to include combinations of terms, exclude irrelevant terms, and laser-target your results to focus on conversations that can provide valuable intelligence leads.

When you monitor Twitter, you’ll need an advanced tool that can handle advanced search operators along with geo-targeting. You’ll want to analyze the sentiment of tweets and filter whether or not they are positive or negative. This can’t be done with twitter’s default intelligence tools.

Automating Twitter Monitoring for Intelligence Alerts

Our tool Twilert provides an automated system that gives your geo-targeted, sentiment analyzed social media intelligence that is delivered directly to your inbox in real-time. This powerful capability enables you to set up alerts for an area and get data when it arrives. You will not waste any time re-entering your search queries, and you will build an intelligence workflow that feeds you information as it occurs.

If your team is manually searching twitter, you need to get them into an automated workflow solution. Our team can help you understand how to set up an alert campaign that works. Or, if you’re savvy and you want to try the tool out yourself, feel free to use it free for 30 days. Be sure to ping us with any questions and we’ll help you set up your twitter intelligence tool.

There are numerous tools to help you manage your intelligence processes. We believe we have built the most robust twitter data gathering tool available and our thousands of customers are our testimonial. If you’d like to organize a demonstration of our tool, feel free to reach out to us. Otherwise we offer a free self-service trial to see if the tool is right for you.

Click Here to Start Your Free Twitter Intelligence Campaign