Twitter has been spotted developing a new feature that will allow users to sign up for push notifications for specific search terms.
Users who have subscribed to a search term will receive notifications when new tweets containing that word or phrase are published.
Android developer Dylan Roussel discovered this feature in a pre-release version of the Twitter mobile app:
Twitter is working on a feature allowing you to subscribe to search results. Once subscribed, you'll receive push notifications for Tweets about your search query! 🤯 pic.twitter.com/plTlt484oN
— Dylan Roussel 🇺🇦 (@evowizz) May 31, 2022
This new feature for Twitter is called ‘Search Subscribe,’ and it will be available in a future version of the mobile app.
It appears to be a TweetDeck-inspired feature. Given that the last TweetDeck app will be retired next month, it’s nice to see one of the app’s best features continue to exist elsewhere.
Search Subscribe appears to be simple to use. Roussel’s tweet demonstrates how to set up notifications in two steps.
Enter a word or phrase in the search bar and press the right-hand bell icon. After that, Twitter will display a message informing you that you’ve been subscribed.
Roussel says he hasn’t yet received any notifications, so it’s unclear what the notifications will look like when the feature is released.
Read Integrating Twitter Into Your Social Media Marketing Plan: Here’s Gawdo.com’s insightful guide.
It’s also unclear how often the alerts will be sent.
On the one hand, this could be a useful tool for keeping track of brand mentions. You can subscribe to tweets containing your company name and receive notifications even if no one mentions you.
If you subscribe to a term that is tweeted about dozens of times per minute, on the other hand, depending on how notifications are delivered, this could be an intrusive nightmare.
Will Twitter alert users to all tweets or just the most recent ones?
Perhaps Twitter will allow you to customise your notifications so that you can set the frequency at which you want to receive them.
To find out for sure, we’ll have to wait until the feature is released. It’s currently available in Twitter Alpha, which is typically reserved for programmers.
It will be made more widely available in a future update, which could be the next one or a few versions later.
Learn more from Twitter and read On Twitter, Here’s How To Easily Search For Tweets By Date.
