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A Roundup of Twitter Tracking Tools

by Dan Greenfield on 06/09/2009 09:55   19 comments , 17626 views

I want to share with you a roundup of Twitter tracking tools that I have put together. It’s the result of the market research I did before launching our own prototype of a Twitter measurement tool a few weeks back.

The list below summarizes tools that analyze influencers or popularity, evaluate sentiment or number of mentions, identify the location of the person tweeting, offer trend analysis or focus on time frames. I marked an “X” in the category that I perceive is the tool’s primary utility. That is not to say that each tool doesn’t do other things.  Also as an aside, I personally don’t like the idea of sharing my Twitter password with a third party.  You will need to decide whether you want to share yours with tools like Twitstat and Twitterank.

This list is not exhaustive, but it may be helpful in trying to manage the deluge of daily tweets. (Please use the comments section for suggested additions and changes.) 

Twitter ToolServiceInfluencers PopularitySentiment MentionsLocationTrend AnalysisTime Sensitive
Haop.inShows what people are twittering about in major cities  xxx
HashtagsProvides analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what’s happening now   xx
KloutTracks the impact of opinions, links and recommendations across your social graphx  x 
RetweetistTracks what is being retweetedx    
Thummit Offers sentiment analysis, based on conversations on Twitter x  x
ThunderNimbleMonitors and manages mentions of your products, services, brands in social media x xx
TweetbeepKeeps track of conversations that mention you, your products or company, etc with hourly updates; tracks who’s tweeting your website or blog x  x
TweetburnerTracks links shared on Twitterx   x
TweetmemeAggregates links on Twitter to determine most popular links; Analyses links that people have tweeted, organising and categorising them - delivering streams of the most popularx   x
TweetScanAllows you to set up an alert to be emailed every time there are tweets matching your keywords x  x
TweetGridAllows you to search for different topics, events, converstations, hashtags, phrases, people, groups, etc in real-time; Automatically updates the grid x xx
TwitalyzerEvaluates Twitter user activity; reports on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, etcx    
TwistShows you aggregated data about what people are saying in Twitter   xx 
TwitscoopCrawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual x x x
TwitrratrDistinguishes negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic x   
TwitstatShows most popular words of the last 500 tweets; Gives automatic hourly updates of the Top 10x   x
TwitterFriendsHelps users find meaningful connections; shows a tag cloud of meaningful contactsx  x x 
TwitterGraderRanks top Twitter influencers overall and by locationx x  
TwitterholicTracks which Twit has the most followersx    
TwitterLocalFilters Tweets by location  x  
TwitterankAttempts to quantify a Twitter user by analyzing their incoming @repliesx    
TwitturlyProvides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Tracks and ranks what URLs people are talking about on Twitterx   x

 

As Pete Fasano and I have discussed, no tool appears to be the holy grail incorporating all these features. I for one want a tool that pulls tweets around your key word  search and ranks them by sentiment, influencer, and location.  I want trend analysis, not just a list of tweets, and I want real time data.   I was reminded of a comment that Anna B made in a post in ReadWriteWeb:

I have worked at several agencies working to put together budding social media practices, and have been pitched by many of the social media monitoring tools. I totally buy the concept– the ability to “listen-in” on consumers in their native space. The challenge I find is that none of the offerings provide the total package.

 

Some key things on her wish list:

  • Efficient filtering of queries (most important, and often very poorly done)
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Sentiment plus (point in time, trend over time, compared w/ competitor, overlay w/ another issue etc.)
  • Identification and targeting of influencers
  • Ranking of “influential” or popular posts
  • Comparison to competitive information
  • Identification of “themes” within the conversation
  • Easy, dynamic ability to chart and graph analysis of queries
  • Self-service set up of queries (not a week or more lead time with “Customer Service”)
  • Backward trending (and not just for 30 days!)

Of course all these tools may become obsolete if Twitter builds a version that incorporates these features.

Some of the source material came from  Spacefruit at HubPages, GreyReview and Measurementcamp. A big thanks to Mike Schinkel for giving me a basic HTML class despite a pounding sinus headache.

They say Twitter is replacing blogs, but still here is some love link to some of the Twitter blogs out there: Klout, Tweetburner, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, Twitalyzer.com, TwitterFriends, TwitterGrader, Twitterank, and Twitturly. These blogs can provide more information about the applications listed above.

Let me get back to you.

 

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