Ten of my favourite reporting and analysis tools for Twitter

I’ve been tweeting for just over a year during which time I’ve tried a variety of tools for reporting and analysis. Some have been quite impressive, but many have been pretty awful.

Here’s a quick look at ten of my favourites.  It’s only a small selection of what’s available – there are loads of others around – and more are emerging all the time

• Twitter Sentiment

  Twitter Sentiment does what it says on the tin – it assesses the sentiment or ‘mood’ being expressed in individual tweets. In the example below the search includes any tweets including “Hampshire” but excluding the word “new” (I want Hampshire in the UK, and there are lots of tweets in the USA for ‘New Hampshire’)

  

  As with many tools, the results should be taken with a pinch of salt – algorithms struggle with irony and sarcasm – but this free tool could be useful as part of a package approach.

• The Archivist

  The Archivist shows summary stats for hashtags, tweets or profiles. The example below shows results for : “#hampshire”,  again, excluding the word “new”.

  

Each of the panels is click-able, and leads to more detail. Here are a couple of examples:

The panel showing top URLs is potentially very useful, but (at the time of writing) there’s a bug with shortened URLs whereby clicking them won’t open the link.

• Twitalyzer

  Twitalyzer has a number of free charts, but also some additional charts and reports available via subscription that may be worth investigating in more detail. The examples below uses the Twitter user “WeLoveLocalGov” as an example (my own stats are too depressing!):

  

  The metrics dashboard is both impressive and a bit overwhelming. A couple of the metrics are rather baffling, but a definition is provided next to each item (reached by clicking the question mark).

  

• Hashtagify

  Hashtagify is useful for visualizing relationships between different hashtags. In the example below, the hashtags #hampshire and #jobs are often used together to denote jobs in Hampshire

  

  The top 6 influencers is an interesting new (beta) feature. The 6 are shown as a list, and as circles on a graph. Hover the mouse over a circle to see the name and number of followers. Click the circle to view that profile on Twitter.

  

• Topsy

  Topsy is a useful tool for quickly seeing different types of content and also provides a basic visualization of traffic over the last couple of days.

  

  The advanced search is quite useful, enabling you to include and exclude specific terms

  Topsy Social Analytics

  It’s Topsy’s social analytics site that I really like though, I love the feature that allows you to compare up to three terms as in the examples below:

  

  The chart is interactive, so you can hover over a point on the graph and see the top item relating to that term

  

• tweetreach

  The next tool tweetreach is very useful for assessing the impact that a particular string of text or hashtag had:

  

  If you register with the site, you can save reports that were run at a particular time as in the example above – this gives a historic snapshot with all the profiles and links clickable. You can also export the data – usefully, CSV is one of the formats.

• Hashtags

  Hashtags is a simple tool that allows you to specify a hashtag and see recent tweets using that hashtag. The scale changes automatically depending on tweet volume. It also displays the individual tweets as a clickable list

  

• Hashmash

  Hashmash is a neat little tool that displays a list of all hashtags associated with the hashtag you specify. Note that Twitter was down when I was writing this, so the photo below is an amalgum of the screenshot and csv output rather than what you actually see on screen for that hashtag

  

• Favstar

  Favstar is a quick way of seeing tweets that have been most popular for individual users. You can order by favourites or number of retweets:

  

  Well, that’s my list for now. If you know of other good ones I’d be really interested to take a look if you can share a link.