Watch out for Twitter trends for your brand
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.
