This post originally recommended TweetAlarm for receiving tweet alerts by email, but it's no longer available. We've updated to include a new and improve method below.

There are lots of ways, both paid and free, to keep track of just about any keyword on Twitter. Whether you run a business account and need to keep track of brand mentions, or there's a specific keyword you want to keep tabs on, one of the easiest ways to do this is by using the automation app called IFTTT.

Here's how to set up custom Twitter alerts sent to your email inbox.

Step 1

To keep track of a specific keyword on Twitter, you'll first need to make sure your Twitter account is connected to IFTTT. Do this by creating an IFTTT account, going into Account Settings, and then clicking Link your account for Twitter.

Once it's connected, create a new applet by going to My Applets > New Applet.

Step 2

For the If this portion of your setup, select Twitter. For your trigger, select New Tweet from Search. In the Search for field, enter the keyword you want to track and click Create Trigger.

Step 3

For the That portion of your setup, you have a couple options.

Receiving Updates by Email

If you want to be emailed the results as you would with a traditional Google Alert, select Email or Gmail. If you go with Email, your action will be Send me an email. If you go with Gmail, your action, select Send yourself an email.

You can select what elements of the tweet are included in your subject line and body of the email by adding ingredients. These include username, text of the tweet, date it was created, the link to the tweet itself, and the tweet embed code.  In both cases, the elements will already be populated with some good suggestions.

Receiving Updates in a Spreadsheet

A more manageable way of approaching this would be to use a spreadsheet. To have these tweets added to a spreadsheet, you can select Google Drive as your action, and select Add row to spreadsheet.

You don't have to create the spreadsheet beforehand. IFTTT will automatically create one with the title that you enter, and will continue to create new spreadsheets each time it hits 2,000 entries. You can also determine what elements from the tweet will be included in your spreadsheet.

One small limitation to keep in mind is that the trigger is limited to 15 tweets per check.

How do you keep track of brand mentions on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.