This is the first in a multi-part series. It gives an in-depth, practical guide to using Twitter Analytics tools for building a content curation strategy for your business. You’ll discover detailed, specific steps that you can take today to get started.
Twitter is an excellent platform for monitoring tools. Digital Creative Strategists and Brand Marketers use social media for extracting strategic intelligence, watching competitors, and keeping a constant ear for new trends. Social Media Managers and Community Managers need to find and engage with relevant content on Twitter to build an authentic social media presence.
However, the issues surrounding internet monitoring are complex and subtle. Given the growing influence of social media, what are requirements and challenges for an effective monitoring tool on Twitter?
Getting Started with Twitter Analytics
The key workflow underpinning all the content curation strategies being described here can be summarized as follows:
- Learn your key topics of interest
- Match those against content from key influencers you follow on Twitter
- Distill the most relevant information gleaned above into a daily report
Several types of web monitoring can be performed using twitter analytics tools on Twitter. For example, you might want to eavesdrop on the market by monitoring the strengths and weaknesses of competitors. Or, you might simply need to detect the key influencers in your professional field.
Perhaps you wish to identify the main trends in your industry in order to remain up to date. Done effectively, this can take into account new sources of information or emergent networks. This is the nature of the social-media beast that is … Twitter.
Typically, the underlying framework of such software for doing Twitter Analytics will be a profile of keywords and/or hashtags which are tailored to your needs. It might be as straightforward as performing a regular curation of tweets containing a specific keyword.
But naive keyword search is not sufficient. Detecting content which matches your keywords in the correct context is a complex and subtle art. The details are beyond the scope of this article. But – briefly put – why is this problem so hard?
The joys of Fuzzy Language Semantics
Simply put, the reason content curation is difficult is that … language is complex. The ways language is used (and abused) on social media makes the problem of curation much more challenging. When using a system of keywords, an effective internet Twitter Analytics tool needs a pre-establised area of focus.
This might be comprised of a larger, carefully-balanced footprint of keywords which give good coverage of that subject without introducing too much spurious, irrelevant content into the mix.
Let’s consider – for a moment – the service provided by search engines on the Internet. There were several early search-engine stalwarts before the Google-era – for example Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek. They performed quite simple keyword filtering on a (pre-ranked) set of webpages.
But then, as the internet grew, we saw the advent of keyword stuffing, synonyms, the use of metaphor and phrase variations. These are all common characteristics of written language.
But they each break the fundamental mechanism of keyword matching, which is based on naive string comparison. This caused these early search engines to often return low-quality or irrelevant search results to users.
We run into the same problem if we want to succeed with using Twitter Analytics to curate content on Twitter. Filtering tweets for a result matching preset keywords sounds simple. But, as for search engines, performing a naive keyword match returns many results with low relevance. This is not of much use when it comes to supplying you with key business intelligence.
Remember, also, that any such system for information collection must work within the tight constraints of Twitter’s API, which imposes several limits – including, for example, the number of times a given API function may be called within a 15-minute time window before throttling is imposed.
(Looking for a painless Twitter Analytics product that finds you new customers on Twitter? Check out Qureet’s cutting-edge Lead-Generation Alert Emails.)