Both Twitter and TweetDeck (as well as most other Twitter Clients) give you an easy way to get a list of responses people sent you. On Twitter itself, this is the @Replies tab off of your home page. TweetDeck gives you a Replies column by default, and if you delete it, you can get it back by clicking on the replies button on the top of the screen. TweetDeck’s replies button uses the replies Twitter feed feature from the Twitter API to work, so it returns the exact same list that you get on the home page.
I’ve found, however, that I often want to track everything that is said to or about me, even if they are not technically @replies. Because of this, I’ve ditched the replies column in my TweetDeck and instead have created my own @replies list of sorts using the Search feature in TweetDeck which uses the Twitter Search API. To do this yourself follow the simple instructions after the break.
Click on the Search icon in TweetDeck
When you receive the to enter what you are searching for, enter in a search where you put in all of the possibilities that someone could find a tweet about you separated by OR and end it with
-from:YourTwitterName
The -from:YourTwitterName will filter out messages that come from you, this is important especially if you write a lot of tweets and don’t want to dominate the feed of tweets that are supposed to be ABOUT you rather than BY you.
In My Search Box, I’ve entered the following phrase:
NickMoline OR "Nick Moline" OR "Nicholas Moline" OR Nick.pro -from:NickMolineIn this case NickMoline is of course my Twitter Name so I search for any tweet that includes that exact Twitter name, but filter out messages that came from me, but I also search for "Nick Moline", "Nicholas Moline" and "Nick.Pro" (this site) to find any other possible mentions of me. I was surprised to find out that there were a number of posts on Twitter that mention me that were not specifically @replied to me.
This tip isn’t exclusive to TweetDeck either, that’s just how I use it, you could also plug that search in at search.twitter.com directly, and then get an Atom feed of the results that you can subscribe to in Google Reader or any other Feed Reader application.