Image via CrunchBase

Anyone with a blog or webstore knows how powerful tweets and retweets of your links can be for getting traffic to your site. Many people, including myself, like to try to thank people who pass along links from my blog through tweets or retweets. But if the person doing the tweeting forgets to add your Twitter username, how will you ever know that your link was passed on?

I’m here to teach you a super-simple little trick that will make sure you never miss when a link of yours is shared on Twitter.

1. Go to Twitter Search.
2. In the search bar, put your URL without the http://www. and then add the text filter:links.
   Example: thewhineseller.com filter:links
3. Want to set up a single search for multiple URLs? Just add an all caps OR between each URL.
   Example:  hillarydepiano.com OR thewhineseller.com OR mylittleponycollecting.com OR cultofcummings.com OR pricednostalgia.com filter:links
4. Hit search. Even if there are no results at the moment, at the top right hand side of the search results page has a link to the RSS feed for those results. Subscribe and every time someone shares one of your links, you’ll be notified via RSS.

Why does this work? Even though the links have been shortened, the Twitter search has the capability to search within the shortened links for the original link.

Disadvantages:

• There is no way to exclude your own accounts from this search so you’ll always see your own tweets. It’s a simple matter to browse past them so I’ve never found this an issue but I wanted to mention it. However, if it really bothers you, you can write up something with Yahoo Pipes to force the resulting RSS to exclude them in the future.
• Twitter only keeps tweets archived in search for less than 2 weeks. You’ll either need to get in the habit of checking this RSS feed at least once every two weeks or set your RSS reader to download the results so you don’t lose them if you can’t check before the archive is gone.

Easy enough, right? Let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions below!