- Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr
The problem with most Twitter analysis tools is that they’re individual centric. They don’t really care about the conversations going on. I can enter my username and find out about me, or I can search on trending topics that many individuals are talking about, but that’s all so very passive.
Knowing about me and about what’s popular could be useful in some instances, but it’s not the way search works in other parts of the internet.
Search
When I search for things on-line, I’m in control. I decide what it is that I’m curious about and then I receive information that helps me accomplish a goal of some sort. I’m not limited to finding out novel facts about my usage of the internet. I’m also not limited to only seeing what everybody else is talking about.
I can find information about topics I want to know about, at that moment.
Mining Conversations
Dawn Foster wrote a post back in May last year called, How to Mine Twitter for Information, that showcased two tools that let you do a few things with search terms on Twitter. But it’s almost a year since that post and I think that there should be more data returned when mining Twitter conversations:
co-occurring words I don’t just want to see who’s talking about the word I’m searching on, I also want to see what else they’re saying when they talk about my search term. Kindof like the trending topics around my search term, whether that term is a word, a hashtag, or a username.
tweet volume Are people talking more or less about my search term on certain days? Do external events or PR pushes drive spikes in the conversation on Twitter? How do I know? I want to be able to connect those dots.
top tweeters Who’s talking about my search term the most? How much are they talking about my search term? And where are they located? Maybe they’re right next door and I don’t even know it.
A New Position
Conversation Mining and Analysis in Twitter should be a bigger deal than it is right now. You can search oneforty.com and find only one tool that gives you the aforementioned metrics around anything in Twitter. That tool is the one that I’ve been working on at Humana, called:
The cool part is that our development cycle is getting faster, and we have a lot of features in the backlog. If you have any feedback, I’m all ears in the comments below.
There are many Chris Hall's in this world. This one blogs and tweets under the code name: hallicious.
