Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there's an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.
Enter Twitter Analytics, Twitter Analysis, or simply just Analytwits (in the tradition of Twitter slang). These analytics tools are growing in numbers; even Twitter is developing them.
Besides Twitter Search, the following 8 Analytwits are some of the more useful web applications to analyze Twitter streams. Each of these tools serve specific purpose. They crawl and sift through Twitter streams; also, aggregate, rank and slice-and-dice data to deliver some insights on Twitter activities and trends. There's no single best analytic tool available but use in combination, they can extract interesting insights from Twitter streams.
8 Great Tools for Social (Twit)telligence
TWITALYZER:
It provides activities analysis of any Twitter user, based on social media success yardsticks. Its metrics include (a) Influence score, which is basically your popularity score on Twitter (b) signal-to-noise ratio (c) one's propensity to ‘retweet' or pass along others' tweets (d) velocity - the rate one's updates on Twitter and (e) clout - based on how many times one is cited in tweets. Its Time-based Analysis of Twitter Usage produces graphical representation of progression on various measures. Using Twitalyzer is a easy; just enter your Twitter ID and that's it! It doesn't require any password to use its service. Speed of analysis is depending on the size of your Followed and Followers lists.
MICROPLAZA:
It offers an interesting way to make sense of your Twitter streams. Called itself “your personal micro-news agency,” it aggregates and organizes links shared by those you follow on Twitter and display them as newstream. Status updates that contain similar web links are aggregated into 'tiles.' Within a tile, you can see updates from those you follow and also those you don't. Another interesting feature is ‘Being Someone', which you can peek into someone's world and see their 'tiles'; designed to facilitate information discovery. You can also organize those you follow into groups or ‘tribes'. You can create, for example, a knitting ‘tribe' to easily what URLs your knitting friends are tweeting. In addition, you can bookmark 'tiles' for future reference. Its yet-to-be-released feature, Mosaic, allows users to group together the bookmarked 'tiles' and turn them into social objects - for sharing and discussion. At the time of this posting, MicroPlaza is still in private beta.
TWIST:
It offers trends of keywords or product name, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph. Select an area on the graph to zoom into trend for specific time range. Click on any point on the graph to see all tweets posted during a specific time. One can also see the latest tweets on the topic. Twist also allows you do a trend comparison of two (or more) keywords. Its graphs are embeddable on any website. A simple but effective tool for trending, similar to what Google Trends is doing for search queries.
TWITTURLY:
It tracks popular URLs tracker on Twitter. With Digg-style interface, it displays 100 most popular URLs shared on Twitter over the last 24 hours. On Digg, people vote for a particular web content, whereas on Twitterurly, each time a user share a link, it is counted as 1 vote. This is a good tool to see what people are ‘talking' about in Twitterville and see total tweets that carry the links. Its URL stats provides information on number of tweets in last 24 hrs, last 1 week and last 1 month. It also calculates total estimated reach of the tweets. Another interesting site is Tweetmeme, which can filter popular URLs into blogs, images, videos and audios.
TWEETSTATS:
TweetStats is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter (TweetStats showed Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, started tweeting since March 2006; 80 tweets during that month). Twitterholic can also show when a person joined Twitter but not in graphical format. Other metrics include (a) Aggregate Daily Tweets - total tweets, by day (c) Aggregate Hourly Tweets - total tweets, by hour (d) Tweet Density: hourly Twitter activities over 7 days period (e) Replies to: top 10 persons you've replied and (f) Interfaces Used: top 10 clients used to access Twitter. In addition, its Tweet Cloud allows you to see the popular words you used in your tweets.
TWITTERFRIENDS:
TwitterFriends focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users' behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links. Its TwitGraph displays six metrics - Twitter rank, CQ, LQ, Retweet Quotient, Follow cost, Fans and @replies. Its interactive graph (using Google Visualization API) can displays relationships between two variables. In addition, you can search for conversations between two Twitter users. This app seems to slice-and-dice data in more ways compared to other applications listed here.
THUMMIT QUICKRATE:
Thummit offers sentiments analysis, based on conversations on Twitter. This web application identifies latest buzzwords, actors, movies, brands, products, etc. (called ‘topics') and combines them with conversations from Twitter. It does sentiment analysis to determine whether each Twitter update is Thumms up (positive), neutral or Thumms down (negative). Click on any topic to display opinions on the topic found on Twitter. In addition, it allows people to vote on topics via its website or mobile phones. The idea behind this app is good but still has some kinks to work out.
TWEETEFFECT:
TweetEffect matches your tweets timeline with your gain/lose followers timeline to determine which tweet makes you lost or gain followers. It analyze the latest 200 tweets and highlights tweets that coincides with you losing or gaining two (or more) followers in less than 5 minutes. This application simplistically assumed that your tweet is the sole factor affecting your gain/lose followers pattern. But, in reality, there are many other factors involved. Nevertheless, TweetEffect is still a fun tool to use; just don't take the results too seriously.
Cite: http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/80437
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
The Future of Content Survey: How Effective do Businesses find Social Media Strategies?
We all know social media can do great things for a business. A well developed social media strategy can play a big part in a business’s ability to be successful. However, according to the recently released Future of Content survey, developed by Loudhouse with Meltwater Group, 48 percent of organizations do not consider social media an integral aspect of their marketing effort. It is easy to assume that the reason behind such a decision lies with budgetary constrictions but surprisingly only 18 percent cite this as a barrier. Given the strong potential of social media, what therefore could be fuelling organizations’ hesitancy toward embracing this practice?
Only 37 percent of US companies surveyed consider social media as the most effective marketing method of consumer engagement. Companies are still reverting back to the tried and tested methods of in-person events (61 percent) and print magazines (56 percent) to encourage interaction with their customers. Given that social media is a relatively new practice many organizations have difficulty in creating meaningful or interesting content (23 percent) that emotionally engages their audience. This suggests an overall lack of understanding of the social media landscape.
30 percent of companies cite measurement capabilities as a significant challenge to adopting social media. Companies are used to being able to measure the success of a campaign but social media presents a new challenge in measurement. Tracking social media’s return on their investment (ROI), whether it’s money or time, is unfamiliar territory for many organizations. An average of six people are shown as having some social media responsibility resulting in confusion about whom within an organization should “own” and facilitate social media practices. Ownership is typically given to those with enthusiasm for new technology (52 percent) rather than specific social media skills (32 percent). Without clearly defined roles it is difficult to measure the success of a strategy or its respective goals.
Similarly, a lack of resources and time to devote to social media (38 percent) can affect organizations’ ability to measure the true ROI of social media activities, with only one in six companies fully satisfied with their associated ROI measurement tactics. This suggests that businesses are hesitant to fully embrace social media without first mitigating any risks regarding their associated budget.
While 84% of companies think it is important to monitor what is said online about their brand, only 1 in 5 have invested in tools to do this. This indicates that companies are excited yet challenged by the changing nature of content and are learning as they go in adopting the necessary skills and knowledge. With a further 29 percent of companies planning to adopt monitoring methods in the coming year, businesses now need to re-evaluate how and why they are using social media to ensure this investment is justified.
What these findings tell us is that although overall enthusiasm about social media is high with 35 percent, of those companies having increased their social media budget in the past 12 months, the industry itself is in a transitional period and still very much in its infancy. With transition comes risk, and more emphasis will therefore be placed on measuring its overall contribution in order to help justify the investment. Knowing who is saying what about your brand and where they are saying it is a key part of measuring changes in sentiment and therefore the impact of online activities. It’s important to evaluate your options to determine the best solution for your business.
Cite: http://socialmediatoday.com/n-de-besche/259336/future-content-survey-how-effective-do-businesses-find-social-media-strategies
Only 37 percent of US companies surveyed consider social media as the most effective marketing method of consumer engagement. Companies are still reverting back to the tried and tested methods of in-person events (61 percent) and print magazines (56 percent) to encourage interaction with their customers. Given that social media is a relatively new practice many organizations have difficulty in creating meaningful or interesting content (23 percent) that emotionally engages their audience. This suggests an overall lack of understanding of the social media landscape.
30 percent of companies cite measurement capabilities as a significant challenge to adopting social media. Companies are used to being able to measure the success of a campaign but social media presents a new challenge in measurement. Tracking social media’s return on their investment (ROI), whether it’s money or time, is unfamiliar territory for many organizations. An average of six people are shown as having some social media responsibility resulting in confusion about whom within an organization should “own” and facilitate social media practices. Ownership is typically given to those with enthusiasm for new technology (52 percent) rather than specific social media skills (32 percent). Without clearly defined roles it is difficult to measure the success of a strategy or its respective goals.
Similarly, a lack of resources and time to devote to social media (38 percent) can affect organizations’ ability to measure the true ROI of social media activities, with only one in six companies fully satisfied with their associated ROI measurement tactics. This suggests that businesses are hesitant to fully embrace social media without first mitigating any risks regarding their associated budget.
While 84% of companies think it is important to monitor what is said online about their brand, only 1 in 5 have invested in tools to do this. This indicates that companies are excited yet challenged by the changing nature of content and are learning as they go in adopting the necessary skills and knowledge. With a further 29 percent of companies planning to adopt monitoring methods in the coming year, businesses now need to re-evaluate how and why they are using social media to ensure this investment is justified.
What these findings tell us is that although overall enthusiasm about social media is high with 35 percent, of those companies having increased their social media budget in the past 12 months, the industry itself is in a transitional period and still very much in its infancy. With transition comes risk, and more emphasis will therefore be placed on measuring its overall contribution in order to help justify the investment. Knowing who is saying what about your brand and where they are saying it is a key part of measuring changes in sentiment and therefore the impact of online activities. It’s important to evaluate your options to determine the best solution for your business.
Cite: http://socialmediatoday.com/n-de-besche/259336/future-content-survey-how-effective-do-businesses-find-social-media-strategies
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