No Leftovers

*WARNING: Incoming really nerdy twitter talk*

Ok, I’m going to try not to rant about what a hopeless cause it is to get info on a hashtag and share of the few helpful sites that are out there. That’s difficult because getting analytics on twitter (without paying $800 a month or more for tools like sysomos or radian6) has always been a problem.

Twitter Analytics Problems

Part of the problem is the wealth of info on twitter, even in it’s bite size packages. Tack on the fact that twitter doesn’t maintain a reservoir of those tweets that you can just come back and check and you’ve got problems figuring out what’s really going on with your brand or campaign.

You Can Back Up Some Data, So What?

Like I said before, there’s no reservoir of tweets. You can head over to Backupify and grab a free account to track the history of about 5 social media accounts. Still, however, they have not yet offered an option that would allow you to create a backup of a topical discussion. C’mon someone has to want to claim that idea, right? They already limit the data from the accounts you add, so how difficult would it be to add on a service like that also?

Managing Hashtags or Twitter Groups

The issues is looking at a hashtag and get an idea of the whole discussion, not only what’s said from one or two accounts I manage. This may be impossible to do in hindsight, but if you plan for this issue then a site like Twubs can help. This site just makes hashtags what really know them to be in other applications—grouped discussions. So this is especially helpful if you’re planning a twitter chat or you’re just starting to build a community around your hashtag.

Finally Something Semi-Helpful For Analyzing A Hashtag

Knowing everything is real time makes dealing with your hashtag a little less painful. It means if you are tracking a campaign then it needs to be constantly checked and recorded if possible. That may mean doing something as simple as taking screenshots or favoriting  notable tweets. Sites like Twazzup can look at a tag and give you helpful information available for the real-time data. You can go there and see influential users, highlighted messages, recent images, and term clouds. Making regular visits to a site like this one and recording some of the info in an excel sheet can be helpful for managing a long term campaign. (Note: If you just need to report back on the volume of tweets then you can keep checking a site like Hashtags, but there’s not much other helpful data there.)

Rendered on Crowdreel.com

Lastly the only site that impressed me in my search was one called Crowdreel. This site aggregates images which do have a tendency to stick around longer than other information on twitter (because they’re hosted by third party sites like Twitpic). I was about to go 2 months in time for twitter pictures— which is cool for a visual look at what’s happening on your tag, but also not helpful if you need to show data. Still it was cool to generate THIS from food photos.

There are very few helpful websites that you can use to get data for free. None of them completely does the job and they are often slow and unreliable when it comes to pulling data. Cross your fingers that this will be solved in the near future.

Finding what I need may cause me to take up yoga to channel some of the frustration. I’m playing around with Hootsuite and Sysomos later tonight, but should you really have to pay so much for a few ounces of useful info?

-Dwight