In Topsy (free), you can search both hashtags (example: "#winning") in tweets or any phrase that you'd like to observe (example: "welfare reform"). What's especially interesting is when you start doing comparisons. If you visit the site, click on "Social Analytics" at the top of the homepage and observe the graph (seen below). This graph compares the activity of the words "ipad", "kindle", or "galaxy nexus" over the specificed time.
In Topsy Pro, you can manage different hashtags and phrases on the same dashboard by selecting/deselecting check boxes. This allows you to compare a very large amount of phrases and hashtags all in one place. You can also select which social media sites you want to apply your search to. Topsy Pro isn't limited only to twitter, you can search Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and several others.
Lastly, one of the greatest features of Topsy Pro is the "related words" feature. After a user enters an input value (hastag or phrase), the user can select a tab on the dashboard that reveals a tile GUI with other, related hashtags and phrases that are associated with the inputs. This is a tremendous tool because it allows a company to view not only what words are associated with their brand, but the words and phrases that are gathering significant momentum.
This tool has a wide variety of other features, but these are some of the most significant that I thought I should mention. Get a free subscription and try it out.
I used Topsy Pro until my subscription ran out (which is why I don't have any other screen captures to post). I applied the tool to the SGA elections to see who was trending each day. I'm going to post a tutorial using that as an example in the near future.
After reading Chris's article I decided to check out Topsy for myself. I began by searching for key words in Topsy's free analytics section. I wanted to make a comparison of two different sporting events that were going on at relatively the same time. The World Baseball Classic and the NCAA Basketball Tournament both occur in March. I wanted to compare the amount of social media references to each of these events.
ReplyDeleteTopsy's free analytic section did well for this analysis. I searched for 'World Baseball Classic' and 'March Madness'. It displayed a graph much like the one in Chris' original blog. The results confirmed what I had expected; 'March Madness' had many, many times more social media mentions than 'World Baseball Classic'.
I wanted to take the analysis a little further so I signed up for the free trial of Topsy Pro. As Chris stated, Topsy Pro has many more useful options. I could search more terms at once and display them all on the graph or just select specific terms to display. The related words tool was also very helpful. I could compile more relevant data by using all the related words for each topic. Also, more media sites were searched so more data was available.
To continue my analysis, I decided to look at a couple teams in each event. I searched for ‘Dominican Republic’ and ‘Florida Gulf Coast’. Each of these teams were major factors in their respective sporting event and should have many mentions in social media. The results showed that ‘Dominican’ had more hits than ‘World Baseball Classic’ throughout the length of the study. This is probably due to the fact that there are many mentions of Dominican that do not have anything to do with the World Baseball Classic, but ‘Dominican’ did have spikes in its social media mentions that corresponded to mentions of ‘World Baseball Classic’. ‘Florida Gulf Coast’ was interesting. There were almost no hits on ‘Florida Gulf Coast’ at all until March 23. This is the day after they very unexpectedly upset Georgetown. Two days later they had another huge spike in the social media. At this point ‘Florida Gulf Coast’ received almost as many hits as ‘March Madness’ at its peak, approximately 200K.
The last tool I wanted to mention that I found to be useful in Topsy Pro is the geography tab. Displays a map of the world that is color coded based on the frequency of social media mentions of the keywords you are looking for. It will give you the number of mentions for each country, and it will also break down the USA into states as well. For ‘Florida Gulf Coast’, Florida was the state with the greatest mentions on social media. For ‘World Baseball Classic’ the countries involved in the tournament had a much greater frequency of social media hits than countries not in the tournament.
I found this tool and all of Topsy to be very interesting and useful.