Making sense of conversations on Twitter

Tweetshare lets you have Twitter conversations around any piece of content

Tweetshare and Twitoaster have been discontinued.

The annoying aspect of Twitter is that it’s really difficult to follow conversations. There’s nothing inherent to Twitter that makes it easy for you to backtrack a conversation. What many people use for conversation tracking is hashtags, and then searching on the hashtags. Problem with hashtags is they’re not threaded so you can’t see specifically how one person responded to another. Nor can you see the beginning of the conversation.

One service I’ve used before that’s a good solution is Twitoaster, which allows you to follow conversations that you initiate, or someone else initiates. It’s pretty good if you ask a question and you want to follow everyone’s answer to it, but it’s hard to back track a tweet up to its source.

Following conversations is necessary because so many people send out tweets that don’t reference what they’re talking about beyond the @ reply.

Launching today is a new service called Tweetshare, which allows you to have Twitter conversations around any piece of content, whether it’s an HD video, picture, Word document, or anything else. Load the content, and then tweet it out from Tweetshare. The automatically included link takes readers of your tweet back to the Tweetshare space where the content resides. Each response you give includes that Tweetshare space link, allowing everyone to be in the same space talking about the piece of content. As you would with a blog or website, you can create a branded Tweetshare page to post all your tweetable content.

Tweetshare is also a brand new client of mine, and I’ll be attending SXSW next week shooting videos for Tweetshare and posting them to their tweetable zones. I invite all of you to participate then, but feel free to try out the service now. All you need to do is log in with your Twitter account.

But I’m interested in knowing what services you use to follow Twitter conversations. Do you use any, or do you just use search? Or do you don’t even bother because it’s far too complicated?David Spark, a partner in Socialmedia.biz, helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events. Contact David by email, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment below.