Category: tools

With the #RNC2012 (Republican National Convention 2012) kicking off this week, it begs the question, how do you take your politics, or social media for that matter. As one who makes a living from studying Social Media I love when anything major happens, because it gives us a chance to study elements of social media at an accelerated pace. A good TV show promoting their hashtag can have the same effect check out #AGT (America’s got Tallent) or #SYTYCD (so you think you can dance) on their respective nights, their audience is very engaged.

I watch the conversation using a few tools, and thought I would share them with you as this week is a great chance to test drive them and find your favorite.

TwitterFall This is one of my favorites, you can enter a few search terms, and each will appear in a different color. I often use this to observe the 45+ twitter accounts I manage personally. Their are simple options, and you do not even need to be on twitter to watch this one.

SocialBro, as I have mentioned before, I like. They are great for monitoring a Hashtag and seeing who the influencers are in the conversation or where the conversation is taking place. They also let you select people from the conversation for following or putting on a list.

 

Bottlenose is a newer tool in beta that lets you look at a great diagram around the topic, showing the other related tags and you can also tweak it to see topics and who is a leader in the conversation. This is great for spotting conversations that might be related to your primary hashtag. Check out the other tags, as there is a good chance not everyone in those ancillary tags are following the main tag also.

You can also view the data in a few formats, like live

Tagboard another new comer gives you a great newspaper style format. This one is simple to use and great for reviewing material.
SeeS.aw is like Tagboard, but will let you save searches and the stream keeps flowing where Tagboard seems to need to be refreshed (which has its own benefits). 

Geofeedia another Beta provides a map of tweets around a location, or a newspaper format. This helps you see also the conversation in the area of an event, when not everyone is using the event hashtag. I used the Tamp Times Forum as a location, even tho the screen shows St.Pete Times Forum (its name changed).

SocialMention offers a nice clean feed with highlights showing Sentiment, Top keywords, hashtags, users and sources. Great for seeing everything involved in the conversation.

Tawlk another beta is great for a live newspaper feed

Hashtracking is another favorite of mine, they are great for showing you the potential size of your audience as well as a ranking of those involved in the conversation.

These are still just a few of the tools available out there, feel free to share any I missed (my goal here was to give some tools you can use during the convention to follow the conversation).

Just recently we had about 10,000, that’s right ten thousand new follows in a 24 hour period of time. While we were trying to figure our what awesome maneuver we did that got so many people to follow us in such a short period of time, our experience and wisdom told us otherwise. We knew something was amiss. Well enter SocialBro one of our favorite tools for analyzing the following on a twitter account. After some tweaking on my searches I lowered the sliders to those with less then 25 followers, who have not tweeted more then .3 times a day and influence under 7. I was able to notice about 10,000 accounts who just followed us with each of the accounts never having tweeted, and each one having under 25 followers with over 1000-1500 accounts each was following. It made me wonder if this was the work of someone who guarantees so many followers in a certain time.  I digress, the point is that SocialBro is a great tool for analyzing your followers, or even the followers around a hashtag. If you are newer to twitter, save this and comeback to it later when you have a better understanding of what constitutes a good follower for you.

 

 

CrowdBooster is a great tool for analyzing your tweets for the week or the month and looking at them graphically, seeing how many times different tweet were retweeted, and what kind of impressions you had the potential of making. (Note: I say potential, because it does not mean that many people saw the tweet. Just because I have over 4,000 followers, does not mean they see everything I tweet. However this does give you a general idea of which tweets you put out that score better with your followers.)

The horizontal shows how many times a tweet was retweeted, and the vertical shows the number of impressions. (this is just a total of the followers of everyone involved in retweeting the message. If you have one person with 20,000 followers retweet you, that will add 20,000 to this number) By hovering over the dots, you can see which tweet the dot is referring to. You can also choose to look at the data in a table format.

Crowdbooster has some other benefits worth exploring, like top retweeters and recommendations on the best times to tweet to name a few. Best of all this is free to play with and explore at the basic one account level.

Social Mention is a great social search engine that will help you find where people are talking about you or your brand, after all it is only by knowing where your audience is speaking about you, are you able to engage them. Like google alerts you can set up an alert to let you know when people are talking about you.