Top five advanced research tools for Twitter

By Colin Meek (@colinmeek) and Judith Townend (@JTownend)

In our recent three part series we tested the best tools for researching Twitter. If you are engaged in serious research on topical issues you can’t ignore Twitter. And, if you can’t ignore Twitter, then you need to grasp the best ways to tap the resource. Of all the techniques we tried out, these are the ones we rated as our top five:

1. It’s an obvious one, but TweetDeck really is indispensable for us. Not only does it help manage conversations, the powerful Twitter monitoring desktop client allows you to monitor multiple topics, keywords, lists, people or hashtags in columns.

2. Twiangulate provides a very intuitive way of analysing networks and connections.

3. It has its flaws, but Twitter Search ranks pretty highly for us – especially once you’ve got your head around the various advanced operators.

4. Listorious, with a database of more than 2 million Twitter users allows you to search for  Twitter users by topic, keyword or Twitter lists.

5. Tweetscan is a simple, but sensible way to back up your tweets for offline use. It doesn’t catch them all – your last 1,000 messages – but it then combines them with results from its index, going back to 2007.

• In part one of our Advanced Twitter research series we looked at Twitter search: read at this link.
• In part two we examined the best ways of finding people to follow: read at this link.
• In part two we  showed you the best ways to track hashtags and archive your tweets: read at this link.

** Learn more about sophisticated search techniques on our one-day Advanced Internet Research course, Tuesday 5 July in London.**

Tags: advanced twitter research, Online social networking, search techniques, Technology/Internet, tweetdeck, Twitter, Web 2.0

Twitter monitoring tools

During a couple of recent courses delegates have been keen to know more about real-time twitter monitoring tools. So here are a few options:

Tweetdeck is a free download that lets you monitor posts in real-time as well as send tweets directly. Perhaps its best feature is the ability to create columns so that you can track different terms using your own dashboard.

Twitscoop is a very simple tool that allows you to monitor specific trends and buzz around a topic. You can monitor the use of specific terms over the last few hours or days. It doesn’t let you compare keywords however.

Twhirl is another desktop application that you can download for free and then use it to monitor Twitter for specific keywords. You can also integrate this with your Twitter and other social networking accounts.

Tweetscan is a Twitter search tool that automatically refreshes the search every few seconds. This also lets you limit the search to specific users.

Twazzup is similar to Twitscoop but it also highlights related hashtagged terms, the most popular links, featured tweets, and singles out specific Twitter members as ‘trendmakers.’

Monitter also allows you to monitor specific terms as they appear in tweets but this tool allows you to monitor three in their own dedicated columns. Monitter also, very slickly, lets you monitor keywords within a specific distance of a specified location.

Update: See my posts on Tweetgrid and Tweetbeep for more on this.

Tags: search tool, social networking accounts, twazzup, tweetdeck, tweetscan, tweetscoop, twhirl, Twitter