In a recent webinar (which will be posted here soon), I discussed several crowdsourcing strategies. Among them was the strategy of finding a hashtag related to a conference and then building a list of people tweeting about the conference. Why do this? If there is a conference about recent advances in chemistry and you have an interest in recruiting people with that skillset, it stands to reason that they would be attending a conference focused on that. Make sense? (Yes, I thought so too.)

If you know the hashtag of a conference, you can do a search on Twitter for people; but Twitter will only return so many results and over the course of a few days your search will return void. That being the case, its best to move very fast when you hear of a conference you want to mine for talent or… search an archive of tweets later. The latter is much more convenient. If you would, let me show you how.

A very cool tool for building an archive of Tweets is TwapperKeeper and it is soooo easy to use. Let me demonstrate it for you.

1. Go to TwapperKeeper and click the “create #hastag archive” box.

2. Add in the hashtag of the conference you want to monitor. In this example, I am going to use the hashtag #referyes since that was what we used in the webinar I gave with my pal – Ryan Leary. I also added a description of the archive to make it easy for other people to find it as well. (Just to be nice.)

3. Once you started the creation of your archive, Twapperkeeper will give you a link to your archive. (It will also post a tweet announcing that a new archive was created.)

4. TwapperKeeper gives you a quick heads up that says (more or less) give us a little time and we will have your archive ready for downloading in a jiffy.

5. It took about 10 minutes (more or less) for the archive to be ready. I could scroll down all the tweets (a long list of 259 tweets) and/or click the “export and download” link.

And there you have it, an excel sheet full of Tweets for later use.

Happy Hunting!

Jim