AND Support
We’ve long mentioned using “AND” in between keywords to make words match in tweets and in emails to our users, but I don’t think it’s ever been formally written anywhere that you can do this. So some of the below information may already be known to you, if so, please consider it a refresher.

Before I go any further, I’d first like to explain how watchlist items work by default. By default watchlist items are phrases, meaning if your watching for “new car” we’re only going to match tweets that have “new car” somewhere in it. Unfortunately, that means that a tweet that said “I got a car, and it’s new” wouldn’t match (sorry about the bad example!). So, back to where I started, to get around this, we introduced AND support a while back, and that would let you watch for “new AND car” and you’d get the tweet that had my bad example of a tweets text in it. It doesn’t matter what order the terms are in either.

Need to use “and” in your phrase? Use +AND. For example:

Garfield +and Friends

Partial Matches
Recently we’ve been letting in people into our beta program left and right, and since it’s a beta program and we’re trying to figure out how people are actually using Socialping, we’ve been spying on the terms they use. Because of this, and with the increasingly large number of users, we noticed a trend forming: people want to be able to match things that change… the most comon of these, are URLs, like 4sq.com and bit.ly where the beginning is the same, but the ending changes.

Our matching system prior to today doesn’t allow for partial matches, this is for multiple reasons, but the most prevalent is that it almost always doesn’t give people the results they want when we supported it. Yes, when we originally launched, we did support partial matches, but after seeing a number of the very early users struggle with it, we opted to remove it.

So, now that we’ve added it back, sort of, how exactly does partial matching work? Using our short URL example above, 4sq.com (Foursquare), say you wanted to get every tweet that mentioned “mayor” and had a 4sq.com URL, you would add this as your watchlist item:

mayor AND http://4sq.com/*

What if Foursquare ever got more complex, and decided to use sub-domains? No problem, just use this:

mayor AND http://*.4sq.com/*

There are some caveats to partial matching…

• first, in order to use partial matching, you must use at least one keyword and an AND (in the example above, were using “mayor”.
• second, the items must be in order in the partial match section, for example, the above wouldn’t match .4sq.com/12345http:// but it will match http://4sq.com/12345.
• The partial match section should only contain what you want to match, so don’t use a space and then keep going, instead us an AND after it and keep going.

Between these two features we’re pretty sure you can match anything in a tweet. But if you’re still unable to find a way to match something, let us know, maybe it’ll be our next feature announcement.

Got any comments or suggestions to this feature, let us know in the comments below, or on our Get Satisfaction site.

Enabling SMS Notifications

Instead of writing all the steps down, here’s a nifty video that walks you through the process in just a bit over a minute.

Using SMS with Socialping

SMS isn’t just a way to get notifications when tweets match your watchlist items, it’s also a way to reply and interact with the people and tweets that you’ve received.

Sending New Tweets – Sending a new tweet is easy, just send a text message to our number and start it with “new:”, for example, if I wanted to tweet “Hello World” I would send an SMS like this “new:Hello World”, and when I did, a few moments later I’d get a confirmation SMS message stating that it was posted to Twitter.

If you’ve got access to multiple accounts, make sure you login and go to your profile page by clicking on your name in the top right corner of any page and then select the default account you want the tweets to come out of.

Replying to a Tweet Notification – If you get a tweet via SMS and you want to reply to it, you can! To reply to a tweet, just do “re:@username this is my response”, and they’ll get a response instantly, including all metadata, like what tweet it’s in reply to.  To make things easier, if you are in charge of multiple brands and therefore have access to multiple companies, you don’t have to change anything, we’ll automatically figure out which account it’s meant to come from.

What’s next?

We have a few ideas for how we can make SMS even better, but before we implement any of them, we’d like to know exactly what feature’s you guys need.  Feel free to post a comment below, or post it to our support and suggestion site.

Happy Pinging.