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Twitter Search API Changes – More Exciting News From Twitter!

 Clicky, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Optimization, Viralheat  11 Responses »
Apr 012010
 

I’ve just received the following announcement from Taylor Singletary at Twitter:

“As indicated a few weeks ago, we’re launching our new *beta* enhancements to search.twitter.com and the Search API today — it’s currently rolling out to our servers. Thank you all for your feedback.”

I usually comment on these things after I’ve had a look at some of the resulting data, but in this case, there are some interesting facets of the announcement that I’d like to reproduce here.

“To date, Twitter’s real-time search has proven to be incredibly valuable. People, businesses and organizations have come to depend on finding out what’s being discussed about a particular topic *right now*.

“We’ve been really impressed at the integrations many of you have developed using the Search API. Whether it’s offering search columns in a Twitter client, mapping #hashtags to search, or deep analysis of trends and brand monitoring, you’ve shown us what’s possible with Twitter search.

“With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author’s profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted,
favorited, replied, and more. It’s an evolving algorithm that we’ll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.

“With this initial release, if we detect that there are particularly interesting & relevant tweets for a given query, we’ll display at most 3 of these tweets at the top of the page. We’ll also display the number of times these tweets have been recently retweeted as well.”

That’s a pretty impressive capability if they’ve really done it. I’ve held off commenting on Twitter’s new “front page” for people who aren’t signed in, mostly because I’ve been waiting to see if it had any impact on the rate at which new users join Twitter, and that takes a few days to get a large enough sample to be meaningful. I don’t personally use the information that’s on the front page – I either use commercial tools like Clicky and ViralHeat or go directly to the data via the APIs.

But the new metadata that’s coming from Twitter Search is going to radically alter the way I use Twitter Search. So, as the saying goes, “Watch This Space!”

 Posted by Ed Borasky at 20:50

What the Heck is Happening to Internet Explorer?

 Clicky, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Optimization, Twitter Monitoring Tools, Twitter Text Mining, Viralheat  10 Responses »
Feb 042010
 

If you’re a web analytics aficionado, you know that most analytics tools, including Clicky, give you statistics on which browsers your visitors are using. Through the magic of Clicky’s real-time analysis, you can see this for my web site for the past 90 days. I’m opening this blog post up for comments – the question is, “What the Heck is Happening to Internet Explorer?”

Clicky Web Analytics

 Posted by Ed Borasky at 13:29

Twitalyzer 2.0 – A Big Step Forward

 Clicky, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Optimization, Twitter Monitoring Tools, Twitter Text Mining, Viralheat  12 Responses »
Jan 192010
 

As you probably know, there are quite a few tools out there that attempt to “score” Twitter users. I’ve looked at most of them, and I have yet to find one that does everything. But the one that’s the most flexible, customizable and useful to me as a micro-blogger is Twitalyzer 2.0.

Twitalyzer is the brainchild of Eric T. Peterson (@erictpeterson), a noted web analytics expert and author of Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer’s Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business. Eric brings a passion for analytics and an understanding of the need for actionable metrics and reports to the Twitter scoring arena, something I haven’t seen in any other tool.

What’s new in 2.0? Quite a bit. There are more metrics, a 51-page handbook, tools for segmentation of users, benchmarks, goals, sentiment analysis, and, of course, more of the flexible dashboards and reporting that set Twitalyzer 1.0 apart from the other Twitter scoring tools. I counted 15 separate reports, and I probably missed some. You can plot trends for 22 separate metrics over time.

The two things I liked the most about Twitalyzer 1.0 were:

  1. All of the metrics were defined. You could see what was being counted and what those counts meant.
  2. There were clear recommendations on how to improve your scores.

Twitalyzer 2.0 has kept that. There are many more metrics, but they are still all defined. And the recommendations are still there, along with a new “Goals” report that allows you to set goals and track your progress towards them.

But in my view, the most important new feature of Twitalyzer 2.0 is the Segmentation / Tagging functionality. I’m still learning how to use this, but the examples in the handbook are very well written, and it’s clearly a vital part of any analytics tool set.

How does Twitalyzer compare with the other Twitter scoring tools? There are two others I’ve used in depth, TwitterGrader and Klout. TwitterGrader reports only a single score, and there is no definition of how that score is derived or what actions one should take to improve it. Klout has a few reports, a number of metrics and recommendations for how to improve them, but the Klout reports seem to be full of old data, and it can take hours for them to update your results. And I didn’t see anything like Twitalyzer’s segmentation capability.

There are a few things that could be improved.

  1. Location: Twitalyzer maintains separate lists for all “spellings” of a locality. For example, there are separate lists for “Portland, OR”, “Portland, Oregon” and “Portland, Oregon, USA”. Twitalyzer isn’t the only tool that suffers from this – TwitterGrader does too, and many tools don’t do location-based analytics at all. But it would be fairly easy to combine most of the spellings and misspellings of a given metropolitan area like Portland / Vancouver into a single location, using a combination of Twitter Search and the Google Maps Geocoding API.
  2. CSV export of metrics time series: Twitalyzer can export a single time series to CSV format now in the “Trends” menu. But there are 22 or so metrics; a combined CSV file of all of them would be very useful, especially for someone like me who wants to correlate Twitter metrics with other metrics, campaigns, events, and so on.
  3. I’d like to be able to integrate Twitalyzer data with the Clicky web analytics tools. There is Google Analytics integration now, but I’m not sure I’m going to stay with Google Analytics, even though it’s free and an “industry standard.” Clicky is real-time; Google Analytics isn’t.
 Posted by Ed Borasky at 11:42

Engaging on Twitter with Clicky – Updated 2010-09-08

 Clicky, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Optimization, Twitter Monitoring Tools, Twitter Text Mining, Viralheat  14 Responses »
Jul 292009
 

[followbutton username="znmeb"]

Download “Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit” (pdf, 1.25 megabytes)

Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit

Update 2010-09-08:

Clicky has a new gizmo that I have totally adopted – ClickyChrome. I haven’t made a big secret of how much I like Chromium, the open source branch of Google Chrome. But ClickyChrome just makes it all so much more worthwhile. You install the extension, fill in a control option panel, and then you get:

  • A badge in the upper left corner of your browser that shows either visitors currently on line, total visitors or goals completed, and
  • An optional popup that notifies you when someone completes a goal.

So, if you’re a Clicky user, install Chrome or Chromium if you haven’t already, and head over to http://meb.tw/9yWWRL. I’ll be watching for you.

If you visit my web sites, you’ll know that I use Clicky to do my web analytics, and that I have placed Clicky affiliate links on all of them. In the past few weeks, a number of people have asked me why I use Clicky instead of the “free” tools, and how I use it.

Why Clicky, as opposed to the free tools? Well, when people talk about free tools, they’re usually talking about either raw server visitor logs, which need to be post-processed, or Google Analytics. Google Analytics is certainly popular and comprehensive, but I’ve found it extremely difficult to set up and manage. I’ve only managed to get Google Analytics set up on one of my sites, and I found the reports and dashboards incomprehensible.

Clicky, on the other hand, took me about five minutes per site to set up. The most time-consuming part of the operation is installing and configuring the plugins for Drupal and WordPress, the two content management systems I use. That took me about two minutes per site. And then, it just works, and the reports and dashboards are intuitive, easy to read, and easy to configure!

The second key feature of Clicky is real-time analytics. All of the statistics, visualizations, dashboards, goals, campaigns and so on are updated in real time. And there is a Spy capability. With Spy, you can watch visitors as they move around on your web site! I’m watching them as I type this blog post, and as you’ll find out below, I watch them when I am actively engaging on Twitter.

Which brings up the third key feature of Clicky — integrated Twitter search monitoring. You can define Twitter search criteria, and Clicky will monitor the search continuously. The Twitter search monitoring dashboard has the following panels:

  • Tweet rate graph
  • Tweet types
  • @Senders
  • @Recipients
  • Links
  • Hashtags
  • Tweets

I’m not going to spend much time talking about most of the panels, but the “Tweets” panel is fully interactive — it can function as a Twitter client. If you click on the “@Sender” of a tweet, a browser window opens up on that time line. You can click on any active elements in the tweet, and a browser window will open up on the link. And to the right of each tweet, there is a “Reply” and a “Retweet” button.

So how do I use Clicky? First of all, like any other web analytics tool, I define my goals, campaigns and funnels. But I also define a Twitter search monitoring criterion. For example, to monitor reaction to this blog post, I defined a Twitter search for “Clicky”.

Once all of the setup is done, I open up two tabs in Clicky. The first tab is the Spy tab, which lets me watch visitors to the site. And the second is the Twitter search monitoring tab for the search monitoring criterion. Then I post a tweet, for example, a link to this blog post. Once the dialog begins, I can interact with people on Twitter, watch visitors on my web site, and even change things while I’m watching. Essentially I have real-time A/B testing and engagement on Twitter!

So there you have it — Clicky in a nutshell. I think it’s a perfect example of how Twitter can facilitate engagement on the Internet, and why one would want real-time tools, even for a small-scale web presence like mine. Please feel free to comment here, or on Twitter.

Clicky Web Analytics

[tweetbox label="You're here - tweet to me!" default="@znmeb "]

 Posted by Ed Borasky at 13:45
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