With all the hype and hoopla over using Twitter to promote your services, you are piqued to know who is saying what about your brand in real-time. While Twitter search can itself tell you what people are saying about your services, the data that it gives you is most recent, say the last couple of minutes. Ideally, one would want to be able to view what people are saying about one’s brand over a certain period of time and analyse the trends.

The need to do this brought me to this nice site called Trendistic. Trendistic, as the name suggests shows you trends for your search term over a longer period than the simple twitter search. Infact you can view the data for the past 30 days. The screenshot below shows the tweet peaks for the last one week for the brand Tata Nano.

As you hover and click a peak, you can see the tweets of that particular day. See below.

Although this data is still not enough to do any serious business analysis, it is a good indication of getting a pulse of the market. Ideally, one would like to see a lot more data. For example, of the tweets about my brand how many are from which country, which city? What is the profile of the people tweeting about my brand? And a whole lot more. Twitter obviously is in a better position to make this happen. By providing companies with these insights, twitter will also be able to monetize its free service. Infact, given the nature of its service, the tweet data can be invaluable in Market Research.

That said, some brands are currently more suited for analysis of trends on twitter than the others. Its not meant for everyone yet.

Results using Twitter Search:

Update: Incidentally, as I finished writing this, I was sent the link to this article on Twitter being ready to roll out commercial accounts this year. Twitter is all set to roll out commercial accounts where the users can pay for premium services like detailed analytics. “We’ll continue to support the ecosystem with a whole new set of commercial APIs”, says Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone.

Google has some great tools that can help you check the rise and fall ofyour brand in popularity vis-a-vis your competition. Google Insights and Google Trends offer valuable insights into search trends based on historical data.

These tools offer a great way to validate your findings through other modes. Sometimes, they can pop surprises and wipe off any fuzzy interpretations and get a clearer picture.

Take a look at this interesting example that shows the interest levels for mcafee, norton and avira anti-virus. Notice particularly, how April 2009 onwards, Avira has gained more in terms of interest level.

Now, lets look at the growth of each brand relative to the Antivirus and Malware category. Despite the negative growth for the category, Avira has seen a positive growth. And that too of 88%. This should get any competitor to stand up and take notice…

You can also view results by Regions and also see the popular search terms for your brand. And compare this data with that of competing brands.

There is a wealth of search information made available by Google. And as Google’s blog says you can “…forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations. One could identify deviation from such forecasting and identify new factors that are influencing the search volume…”

If this interests you, take a look at this demo from Google -

If you would like us to help you analyse your brand online, give us a shout.