Search before you Tweet to amplify others
Too often I read an article on Buzzfeed or the NYTimes and rush to Tweet my hot take. World, look at my unique insight into this outrageous story. Seconds later I would be embarrassed by the hundreds of better Tweets, better takes, and better insights. The send-email-spot-typo experience but in public. These Tweets would be from diverse and expert viewpoints that deserved to be amplified. On a good day I would delete my hot take and retweet the better angels of our nature.
So I began to search Twitter before Tweeting. Find the expert and diverse Tweets and ReTweet them.
tl;dr? There is a bookmarklet at the end that you can use to Search Before You Tweet.
On search.twitter.com I pasted in the article’s URL and scanned through the Top Tweets.
Sometimes switching to Latest would return a Tweet that better captured the latest thinking on the subject. Mostly though it returned bots and trolls. The News option turned Twitter into a bland news publication aggregator. That is not at all what I wanted to amplify.
I would change “From anyone” to “People you follow” hoping to amplify those I already trust. Changing “Anywhere” to “Near You” is hit and miss depending on the local or global nature of the subject. As I can only read English and Afrikaans, and Twitter uses Bing! for translations, the “All languages” option is next to useless.
This technique worked well. I found Tweets that provided expert views on the article I had come from:
Without this technique I might have simply retweeted the publication:
Or Tweeted something banal like:
Remembering to do this every time I wanted to share an article mean’t copying the URL, opening search.twitter.com, pasting the URL and clicking the Search button. It is easy to do and you can do this yourself.
But there are some caveats. URLs are very flexible and ultimately you cannot accurately search for the whole discussion on Twitter around an article. The best you can do is find the broadest URL for the article and search for that.
utm parameters and other identifiers in the URL can often be unique to you or unique to a subset of people sharing the article. If you want to expand your search then strip off most of the parameters at the end.
If you are adventurous you can often find the canonical URL in the article’s HTML.
Getting the canonical URL is a good idea these days as Google’s AMP has resulted in some people sharing the AMP URL of the article rather than the full version. There are pros and cons to this but overall I prefer searching for and sharing the article’s original URL.
All of this is a bit tedious when you just want to Tweet your hot take or find someone to amplify.
So here is a simple bookmarklet that automates most of the technique. You can save this to your browser’s bookmarks bar. Anytime you are on an article you want to search Twitter for just click the bookmarklet. A new tab will open with the best URL it can figure out already inputted into Twitter Search.
