Digital Media Buzz > Directories, Trend Tracking, Analytics Help Define Twitter

Directories, Trend Tracking, Analytics Help Define Twitter

 

By Jason W. Bunyan

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to join the myriad of businesses and individuals who have begun using Twitter for commercial purposes, and the trend appears to be on the rise. 

While such developments suggest that some Twitter users would like to use the information produced by the medium to inform their strategy, the absence of automated analytics tools has made it difficult to do this. Twitter’s search function can be used to track market trends, but users have had to work with it manually (i.e. one tweet at a time), which makes for slow analysis relative to the faster pace of brick and mortar and other Web-supported transactions.

In the past few months, a number of sites and applications that assist with the gathering, processing and interpretation of information within Twitter have appeared on the market. These solutions are available at a range of price points and vary with respect to their presentation and functionality.

Twitter-related business practices are in the process of becoming faster and more sophisticated, a trend that is significant, as these emerging practices will be able to be used in conjunction with Web applications such as Hootsuite, which allows users to do more with their individual accounts.

The following sections discuss some of the foundational, analytic and trend tracking platforms that are available on the market.

Twitter directories, ranking and search platforms exemplify how users and Web-based services have both begun assigning significance to the information that flows through the Twitter stream.

These directories and services could also be said to be foundational elements of commercial structures in the medium, because they enable Twitter users to classify themselves, to users and non-users alike, as providers of specific services. For example, Googling ‘Twitter directory’ produced five different directories on page 1, and there were 58 pages of results.

Three examples of these services are We Follow, Twitseeker and Twitterholic. 

• Twitseeker uses Twitter’s API to help users and non-users identify Twitter users based on what they have posted in Twitter. It uses a custom tag cloud generator, and was created to help users build communities around specific topics.
• Founded by Kevin Rose, We Follow is a Web-based directory that is accessible to both users and non-users, though users must register in order to use it. We Follow helps Twitterers find organizations and individuals by category and get a basic impression of where they fall with respect to other accounts in their field. The site is updated regularly and features how many new users have recently joined an account.
• Twitterholic is a Web-based ranking site that organizes users based on the number of followers they have, how often they tweet and where they are located. Though it can yield information, it is not updated consistently, and to remain competitive, it would need to be more consistent and offer more features.

Twitter analytics tools tend to fall in one of three categories: 1) Accounts/Web-based trend trackers; 2) industry-level analytics tools; and 3) organic analytic tools.

Retweetist tracks the number of times that a particular account’s posts are retweeted. Updated daily, the site enables users to look up Twitter accounts by name. The site features a timeline chart that maps out how many times a user has been retweeted in a current week, and indicates who retweeted. Visitors can also retweet the posts that they encounter, thereby prolonging the effect of the RT for the user who received it.

In his April 4 article documenting Twitter trend tracking tools, Mashable writer Ben Parr covers 15 solutions, among them Web-based applications Monitter, Hashtags and Tweetmeme; Twitter accounts twithority and PowerSearch; and iPhone apps Tweetie and Summizer.

This year, Omniture unveiled the SiteCatalyst Twitter Analytics plug-in. The plug-in was designed to help businesses “determine how [tweets] about [their] brand or website affect [site] traffic,” writes Entrepreneur.com’s Marshall Sponder. The plug-in “is a fully configurable feature designed to track brand popularity by capturing comments on a brand from Twitter.”

On a theoretical note, Twitter has also given rise to accounts/websites that have been created for niche purposes and track information of a nature that is inherently more difficult to quantify, such as humor. Sites gathering data in this fashion could be referred to as organic analytic platforms.

Favrd, for example, documents humorous, strange and profane tweets based on an algorithm that weeds out ‘social media expert’ fare and exists for the greater purpose of preserving the interpersonal dynamic on Twitter. Favrd’s approach suggests that Twitter data can be reviewed for social and marketing nuances that go beyond popularity or number of times that something was forwarded. 

 

Jason W. Bunyan is a consultant, new media writer for the New York Examiner, and founder of IFN Film and IFN Music — online groups created to serve as resources for festival professionals. He can be reached on LinkedIn or via Twitter at @jbunyan75.