Looking for a Google Keyword Tool but for Twitter.

[Alexei]

For example, get stats on which mobile gadget and/or professional service is the most wanted on Twitter in December. Or what is the 10 most wanted travel destination in December.

How can I harvest that sort of data? Should I use social media monitoring tools for that?

[SwitchFX]

This is a tough one. I spent some time a year ago researching this myself, but alas I found nothing. I did however successful use Google keyword alerts for certain #/hashtags, and it works. I get instant email notification instead of the weekly or daily notification, and then I manually plot the data into an excel file. So even though it isn't made for Twitter, it's still there to take advantage of.

You can, however, use Twitter search to find instances of your keyword, or set up a custom keyword alert in TweetDeck (the preferred AIR based app for Twitterers) or use the browser-based Monitter.

I've never used Monitter, but TweetDeck is very easy to use and you can adjust the amount of API callbacks (updates).


However, if you're a small business or a corporation, and you need to monitor your brand's mentions, then look no further than this.


[cotweet.com...]




Cheers!

[Alexei]

Thanks, SwitchFX!

[SwitchFX]

No problem, Alexei.

Merry Christmas/S Rozdestvom Khristovym.

[seo melbourne]

direct twitter search seems to get less and less functional over time. Third party apps are where it's at.

[Alexei]

Any ideas (names) where to look at?

[tedster]

You can get a rough idea of the discussion volume by use a Google search for [site:twitter.com keyword]. Google partners with Twitter and has access to all the Tweets - but the volume is so immense that they do not tap the whole thing. It's still better that Twitter's own search tool right now.

The challenge with that Google research - and with all third party tools as well - is extracting or analyzing the sentiment. Did the poster actually "want" the item, or did they criticize it, or reject it, or already have it, or just wonder about it? It's not as cut and dried as a search volume number - not by a long way.

Extracting sentiment from text is a vast challenge and most current "listening solutions" can at best be called early beta. Not only that, but the best ones are quite pricey and mostly to be used only by very large enterprises.

If you have that kind of budget, then the place I'd suggest you look for options is Forrester Research. Their "Wave" report follows the industry and they create quarterly reports about the third party listening platform services that are available. Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms Q3 2010 [blogs.forrester.com]

[Alexei]

Many thanks for the idea.