Following the Quest on Twitter

I've gotten a couple of questions about how to follow the Quest on Twitter, and in particular, who to follow.  There are a few Twitter users worth following, to be sure, but there's also a broader strategy, using search.

Starting with the "Who to follow" question, there are a few generating original content and a few who just retweet everything coming from the few generating original content.  Even for the few who are creating original content it will tend to be redundant with what shows up on their Facebook page (social media, sigh).  That said, Twitter users to follow include @theyukonquest, @EmilySchwing, @Whitehorse_Star, and @FDNMQuest.  The first in that list is the official race Twitter account, and the others are from the news media.  Let me know if you hear of handlers or race fans tweeting from the trail or checkpoints.

That said, you can scrape up a lot of Twitter activity about the Quest without following anybody, by using Twitter's search function, either on their search page or from a decent Twitter client.  Note that a lot of Twitter clients don't support search, and if yours doesn't you may want to use the Twitter search page or find another client.

If you go to Twitter's search page, you'll see this:

As simple as it gets - a text entry box with a search button.  If you enter just Yukon Quest you'll get a list of recent tweets (newest first) containing the string "Yukon Quest" (note while Twitter cares whether or not the search operators are upper-case or lower-case [or mixed-case]), the search itself is case-independent and you'll be fine with yukon quest, Yukon Quest, or yUkOn QuEsT):

The wider right-hand column shows you the tweets, while on the left it shows you who's tweeting about the Yukon Quest, as well as photos and videos related to your search.  If tweets arrive while you've got the search running you'll get a notification at the top of the search results panel, like this:

Click it, and you'll be shown the new tweet or tweets.

However, if you just search on "Yukon Quest" you'll probably be missing some interesting tweets.  With only 140 characters in a tweet, tweeters will leave stuff out.  You could easily miss something along the lines of "Someone just arrived in Braeburn with a broken runner."  One thing that can help is to do another search, one on the #yukonquest hashtag.  

You can combine the two searches into one, getting the search results in one place, by using the OR logical operator.  Note that "OR" needs to be entirely in upper case for Twitter searches, to distinguish it from a search on the term "or".  So, change your search string to:

yukon quest OR #yukonquest

and you'll find that you're getting more hits.

Personally, I prefer to use a good Twitter client that allows me to follow more than one search at a time, some about mushing and some about technology.  I like Tweetdeck, since it runs on every platform I'm interested in, supports a variety of social networking sites, and has a powerful set of features.

You can easily add a separate search column for the Yukon Quest:  

Click on the "+" sign in the upper left-hand corner and a search box will open up:

Enter your search terms (Yukon Quest OR #yukonquest), and Tweetdeck will create a new search column for you, checking for tweets related to the Quest and showing you the new ones as they are posted.

[Edited to add that it looks like some people are using the hashtag #yq2013, so you may want a search string that contains it: yukon quest OR #yukonquest OR #yq2013