I find Twitter the most essential social media tool for Internet Marketers on many levels, mainly because of its search API. Unlike Facebook's and Google Plus's non-existent search options, Twitter makes it easy to go through the huge amounts of updates being published every minute and find those which are relevant (and important) to your brand.

Twitter search is priceless for various tasks:

• Track updates from any niche conference or event (through the official hashtag). In this particular case, archiving is very essential because your archive will let you find testimonials for your next event or quotes for your event coverage, etc.
• Monitor most recent link building opportunities. I for one use Twitter search to instantly react to niche guest posting invites;
• Monitor your own brand mentions (both linked and unlinked). Here's one post I did previously on awesome Twitter search operators that let you filter out all the clutter and track only very essential brand mentions (for example, filter out Twitter updates that contain links and only listen to "real" conversations);
• Keep an eye on your competitors and how they are doing on Twitter (for example, find negative mentions and be there to offer a better alternative)
• Identify active users and influencers within your niche (and get connected to them).

The free Google Spreadsheet I am reviewing in this article can help you with all the above tasks: it collects tweets, archives them and lets you analyze them!

Twitter Archive in Google Docs: Setting Up

Twitter Archive is not that easy to set up, but it has some awesome functionality.

Here's how I got it started:

• Copy the spreadsheet to be able to start editing it. Once you copy the spreadsheet, you should see two new menu items added: "TAGS" and "TAGS - ADVANCED"
• In your copy, go to "Script Manager" and run "setup" script to authenticate it;
• Go to the very first tab, scroll down through the instruction and put your search terms in "Settings" section;
• Go to the TAGS menu and click "Run now!" to start collecting the search results.

The tool will collect the most recent 1500 results and structure them in a spreadsheet format.

You'll love it!

Archive Twitter Search Results (Basic Features)

This part is the easiest one and it's enabled with the basic features of the tool. Just give it some time to collect results and start clicking through the tabs:

"Dashboard" is the visualization and summarization of your Twitter search archive:

• Top users tweeting your search terms in a chart;
• Tweet volume over time.

The "Summary" tab will give you lots of insight into the search term popularity and user distribution. See:

• Most active users who tweet your term;
• Tweet rate (number of tweets per minute);
• The oldest tweet in the archive, etc

Archive tab displays all the search results. The sweet thing is that you can archive all the new results daily (or weekly) in new tabs or add the newest results to the same tab (this option is set in the "Readme/Settings" tab: select between the "Continuous" and "Paged" parameters).

Analyze Twitter User Relations, Identify Influencers (Advanced Options)

But wait! There are advanced options too!

For these, you'll have to get Twitter API, which is quite easy.

Register for an API key with Twitter. In the form these are the important bits:

• Application Website = the one you see in "Readme/Settings" tab under "Settings"
• Application Type = Browser
• Callback URL = https://spreadsheets.google.com/macros
• Default Access type = Read-only

Don't share you key with anyone.

Now Go TAGS -> API Authentication and provide your API data. I had to re-run the authentication script from Tools -> Script Manager to force it to run but in the end it worked!

The Advanced features are simply awesome!

1. Generate the detailed information about Twitter users who tweet your search term, including friend and following counts, description, location, etc.

2. (Pure gold!) Find out how the Twitter users who tweet your search terms are connected: How many of them are friends with each other, who are the most popular ones, etc. Identify influencers in your niche! Find tribes!

(The above spreadsheet is sorted by "DEGREE" column which stands for how many connections this user has with other Tweeps from your spreadsheet (people the user follows + people who follow the user = degree). The higher the degree, the more connected this user is!)

Now, the spreadsheet is fun to play in numerous ways. Mind that if you have trouble collecting results or getting it to work, always try re-saving any of the scripts from Tools -> Script Manager menu.

One last tip: if you are (still) on FireFox, consider using one of these addons to let your browser open the spreadsheet automatically daily (for most active archives) or weekly for you not to forget to update the archive.

Ann Smarty is a search and social geek who loves tools and blogging on them. She is the owner of My Blog Guest, the free guest blogging community that connects guest authors to blog owners. Ann is also Community and Branding Manager for Internet Marketing Ninjas.