Twitter Tracking Tools

Twitter is becoming an interesting force… One thing it does have over Facebook and many other social networks is the complete “open” feel. Your page with all your statuses or “tweets” in this case, are all on display for the world to see, whether they are your friend or not.

I won’t get into the ramifications of this particular setup for a social network, but today’s post is about TRACKING. Why would you want tools to track twitter with?

Twitter is growing at a rapid pace. Humans are lazy.. (efficient is a nicer word) and we like simple things, easy things… and Twitter is much easier than starting your own blog and easier than email marketing etc… Tracking trends on Twitter may actually allow you to…

• Notice when a particular industry trend occurs
• Jump into the conversation when your industry topic gets tweeted about
• Reputation and brand manage if anything bad is said about you or your products or services
• Stay in the groove on your favorite topics…
• Heck even listen for earthquakes in your area
• Crowdsource if your planning a new product and haven’t come up with any ideas yet…

TweetBeep – Is like the Google Alerts of Twitter. This thing keeps track of all twitter tweets around certain keywords. Those words could be your name, your brand, your website URL or Competitor’s URLs… Or both if you wanna really keep an eye on things…

Monitter - Like Digg’s famous screen saver, this one has a really cool visual ability to watch conversations and track keywords and specific hash tags. (Hash tags are those #topic things that allow people to better organize conversations on Twitter.)

Trendistic – If you actually searched Google for “Twitter Track Tools” you most likely meant this one! It’s like Google Trends but much handier. Curious what the hot topic in the last 30 days was? How about what time of day would be best to join in on a Twitter conversation about… work, celebs, babies, weight loss or any niche? Use this to find out!

Hashtags – If Google designed a twitter tool, I bet it would look exactly like Hashtags.org does. Incredibly sparse, and utilitarian and incredibly simple – yet powerful.Not as many features as one might think, but probably useful if that’s ALL you want to do is track a hashtag (A specific twitter conversation).

Tweet Grid – Aww, didn’t get  enough info overload with your RSS feeds today? Too bad, but this tool can certainly accomplish it in 30 seconds or less! Basically all this thing does is load up to 6 real time twitter results on search words you choose at the same time…. Like any human could really read that much data!

Twitter Grader - If you want to see a graph of your account or another user’s account, or get an idea of how well they rank against 6 million other users, consider this the Alexa of Twitter tools. It’s pretty much like that, really good to see… hey did this twitter user become a rising star over night? Or did it take years? The user follow history will graph that for you…

Twitter Charts – Apparently… I tweet most often on Tuesdays at 2pm and 10pm! Wow that’s cool! Enter someone’s twitter username (or your own) and see how often they tweet, and at one time… Competitor spy tool? Me think so!

What The Trend? – Yeah, they called it that… Anyway this thing tells you which hash tags (conversations) are rising in popularity.. Cool stuff?

Twitter Analyzer – Very nice graphic presentation, probably a bit too much pretty – but still info packed with stats about individual twitter user names none-the-less. This is a nice dashboard style look at someone’s account, what they tweet about who they are etc… and of course what time of day too.. Not quite as nice as the twitter charts.

Tweet Stats – Gives some pretty impressive numbers on an individual twitter account, takes a bit to load though but it has some features that I really like. It shows who they @reply to most often, what interface they use the most (Im surprised I use web more than Blackberry!) Also interesting is who’s stuff I re-tweet most often… Wild!

TweetSheep - Creates a tag cloud of a given username’s most used words… I can think of a few things you could use that for… Appeal to the interests of a popular Twitter-er by observing their favorite topics… Easily..

Tagalus – What’s that twitter hash tag mean? What’s #seo mean anyway? Find out here. The dictionary of hash tags.

Bit.ly – Tracks many URLs used on Twitter, shows the realtime stats of how many clicks each has received. Very cool that it not only shows stats for your own URLs (website addresses) but other people’s too!

TwitterFall – A neat Digg screen saver like completely customizable twitter feed you can watch in your web browser.

TweetVolume – Enter a few words and see how often they appear on twitter in general, quite interesting to use this as a form of keyword research for your next writing assignment…

TweetMeme – I use this on my blog to show the tweet count you see on each of my posts… But what is it, really? Besides a fancy “tweet” counter, it also shows the stats of shared links on Twitter. What’s more impressive than it’s Bit.ly like counter is the fact that it separates links by audio, video and news. Bit.ly only shows hits and impressions etc.

GTrend – Someone’s made a “trend” tracking account to track Google trends, that’s kind of neat. Follow him to keep an eye on interesting Google search trends.

TweetEffect – What last tweet gave you that big rush of followers? Was it you announcing you were going to go walk the dog? Or that monumental post about your website? TweetEffect, claims to have the answer.

Tinker – Tinker claims to be watching 7.5 million people on Twitter and Facebook at the exact same time, and offers stats, insights and also a feature to integrate their engine into your website. Worthy of further investigation.

Splitweet – Manages multiple twitter accounts and monitors your brand so you can reply from various accounts all with one simple engine.

Tweetizen – Ever wished that your social media gurus were in a separate live feed on Twitter than the friends at the office? And the save money and coupon ones… They should be in their own separate feed, and what about that guy who announces earthquakes in your area? Now you can do that. Seems like a feature that should have been included since day 1… Like lists & retweets.

TwitLinks - Monitor all the techie and popular technology authors from one place.

Twistory – Take Google Calendar (or your calendar app) and your twitter account and smash them together to see a real time timeline or actual calendar of tweets. For those who really wanted their tweets of given days in their calendar it’s almost like automated journaling…

Tweetzi – Probably the only twitter search engines that has it’s own set of search operators. Search operators are commands besides just the keywords you enter. For example you could enter a “?” and find tweets asking a question, or ” ” and find negative topics vs ” ” where you would find positive topics.

Twendz – Sorry, but the “twendz” interface is about as cheesy as their name itself. However, some may find the engine nice for monitoring hash tags in real time and watching conversations unfold… But really you could do that with the existing Twitter, just not as pretty as this!

That’s all for today,

All the best
Daniel j Deyette