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The Top Seven Twitter Tools to Monitor Hashtags

As bloggers, our use of Twitter as a way to promote, engage and measure our influence is getting more and more sophisticated each day.  We participate in chats, contests, tweet-ups, and monitor several hashtags at the same time, just to keep up.

Last week I wrote about Klout, at the moment the most important tool to measure your online influence, and even listed the 31 Latina bloggers with a Klout score over 40. Today, I´ve put together a list of some of the tools that help you manage all the hashtags you keep track of and to keep archives of chats or parties you might have missed, or just want to relive.  Time to put your Twitter experience in overdrive.

1. Tweet Chat–If you’re a newbie at Twitter parties, then Tweet Chat is a great option to get you to hop in to your first one.  It refreshes constantly and allows you to see just one stream of the action while automatically updating your tweets with the hashtag of the chat, or room, you’re participating in.  It is also great if you want to search for a hashtag and see the latest activity.
2. Tweet Grid–For more advanced Twitter party-goers, or for those of you who just like to  jump in, this is one of the best ways to participate and host a chat.  While the site’s design is not very appealing, and it is confusing to find your way around it the first time you use it, once you get a hang of it you will find it much easier to participate in a live Twitter party. The beauty of it is that you can select the number of columns and what feed appears in each. So, in one you can have the party host(s), in another the hashtag stream, and in the last your @ replies.  You won’t miss a beat.
3. Twitter Search–Much like Tweet Chat, it allows you to search for a topic or hashtag and shows you the current live stream.  The Advanced Search option lets you insert more specific details for your query so you can find any topic you want to keep up with.
4. What the Hashtag (WTH?!)–Have you ever seen interesting tweets followed by some obscure hashtag (like #DLBChat) and wished you knew what it was all about? Well, WTH?! is a very useful “encyclopedia” of hashtags that creates pages with descriptions, related tags, official links to hashtag creators or owners, a list of the top contributors, as well as a stream of the last 10 tweets.  WTH?! is user generated, meaning you need to login and submit a hashtag for all the information to appear on its page.  If you ever host any type of Twitter chat, I suggest you submit it to WTH?!
5. Twapper Keeper–I’ve been obsessed with Twapper Keeper for a while now. It’s been the best tool to keep track of hashtags for clients and Twitter parties.  You can search for any username, hashtag or keyword and create an archive that is searchable and even downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet.  The archive stats are incredibly useful to report metrics on any given campaign or user.  I recommend you go now and create an archive of your own twitter handle. You really never know when you might need to grab a tweet you’ve sent.
6. The Archivist–Similar to Twapper Keeper, but with a more attractive design, it allows you to search Twitter and then save, analyze and export the data.  They have also made it very easy to share an excel or zip file of your archive. Another plus is that it allows you to save any archive privately.
7. Hashtracking–Relatively new to the scene, it allows you to track and analyze any hashtag.  The focus is more in premium services for users who need real metrics of their influence and reach, and for companies looking to analyze and identify the real players in their campaigns.

Do you have a Twitter tool you use to monitor hashtags?  What are some of the hashtags you are following at the moment?  Please share. We all learn.

This article is cross posted by the Tweasier team following permission provided from the original owner Ana L. Flores, you can read the original post here on her brilliant blog. We would like to thank Ana for sharing her content with our community. If you have a blog post you think would suit our community, drop us an email.

The top Five Twitter Sentiment Tools

This post was inspired by a post from an online friend of mine Andy Merchant. Andy put together a list of three free Twitter apps that he thought were useful. I tested them out on the term “Tweasier” as a test and I got a mixed bag of results. However, what do we really expect from a free tool right?

I have listed my favourite Twitter sentiment tools here. Some are free and some are not but if you are looking to use a tool to measure Twitter sentiment sometimes it might be better if you decided to pay for it as you will get more accurate data. However, if you are just going to use it as a quick indication some of the free twitter sentiment tools will be fine.

I should caveat this post by saying as a digital PR specialist I find sentiment analysis of any kind a tad dubious and it shouldn’t be entirely trusted as these tools often can’t understand sarcasm or humour. So although you might be saying something like “This blog post is sh*t hot” it would put that down as a negative comment. So I always tell my clients to bear that in mind. I would say it is an indication rather than something to live or die by.

Here are my top five (6) sentiment tools:

• Sysomos – this is a professional social media monitoring tool which I use from time to time. It is pretty expensive but it has a Twitter sentiment section which can be useful. To be honest this tool is more for the professional social media specialist as it covers everything from blogs right through to Forums.



• Twendz Pro is a clever twitter sentiment tool that looks very sophisticated and allows you to really drill down into conversations and gives the user a feel for a users influence. Unfortunately, again this is a paid for service but the application does look rather impressive.



• Social Mention – Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. It can break from time to time but hey this is a free application and it is by far the best of the free sentiment tools.

• Twitrrart. This is next best of the free ones for me and it is beautifully presented although when I ran a search for Tweasier it presented better data. This tool allows you to distinguish between negative, neutral and positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

• Twitter Sentiment This is a bit basic looking but it did give me results hence the second place. It allows you to research the sentiment for a brand, product, or topic. It was actually a graduate school project from Stanford University.

• Tweetfeel – this didn’t work at all for me. It looks OK and it is supposed to monitor positive and negative feelings in twitter conversations. I have included this app on the blog before.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, so if you have a Twitter sentiment tool you think should be added here, feel free to leave a comment and point us all in the right direction.

Also a special thanks to @Strider47 @IdoNotes for their contributions via Twitter.

Four Twitter Tools to Make Your Followers Happy

There are a lot of Twitter apps out there for managing your account, tracking and sorting followers, using lists, and enhancing your ability to market your business. New apps pop up daily, and the lists just keep on growing.

I’ve done a few posts on these various Twitter tools, typically focused on extending the way you use Twitter and helping you get more out of it as a participant. For example:

• 6 Twitter Clients You May Not Have Heard Of
• 7 Tools to Make Better Use of Twitter Lists
• 5 New Twitter Apps to Play with Over the Weekend

Today, instead of focusing on apps that only benefit you directly, I dug up a few tools focused on making your followers happy. Here are a few of the best tools your followers can use (or you can use for your followers) to improve the Twitter experience.

Link Different

Link Different allows you to check if a link has already appeared in your followers’ streams so you can provide fresh content and keep your followers engaged. To use the tool, you install a bookmarklet and click it from any page before sharing the link with your followers.

Muuter

Muuter lets you mute Twitter users individually by manually selecting a user, or automatically by identifying keywords. Although the service actually unfollows the muted party from your account for a specific period of time and then refollows them, it works like simply muting someone with the benefit of not forgetting to refollow later on. You can use Direct Messages from any app or device, including SMS, to initiate a mute.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and find the ones that are relevant to you. You can use Tweetizen to create Twitter groups, filter tweets and invite others to join your group. You can also embed your groups on your own website and blog.

twtQpon

twtQpon allows you to create a Twitter coupon to share with your followers. This can be a great way to promote a product or service by providing followers with an incentive to purchase. To use the service, create an coupon on the twtQpon site, and a tweet goes out with a link that takes people back to your website to redeem the coupon.

What follower-focused app would you add to the list?

This article originally appeared on sitepoint and was written by Alyssa Gregory we would like to thank Alyssa and Lisa Lang for giving us permission to use it on the Tweasier blog.

How reliable do we expect our social networks and tools to be now?

I was reading an interesting post by Patricio Robels this morning on econsultancy entitled: Can brands trust social media platforms? My first thought is not really but does it really matter all that much that they are not 100% reliable.

In the post Patricio comments:

Upon logging in to Twitter on Monday, I was greeted with the news that I was following nobody and had no followers.

So while this was a temporary glitch resolved within a few hours, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if all was indeed lost. Yet for a brand that has invested heavily in Twitter, logging in to see ‘0 following‘ and ‘0 followers‘ would probably be the source of confusion, worry and possibly even anger.

The good news is that Twitter seems to have improved its reliability over the past year. The fail whale hasn’t retired, but it makes less frequent appearances. The problem with my account, however, which wasn’t isolated to just me, highlights an inconvenient truth: for all of Twitter’s improvements, it’s still not exactly what one might label ‘reliable‘.

I tweeted about the same issue yesterday as I noticed it as well – see the image on the right. I have to admit I don’t share Patricio’s optimism that Twitter has improved its reliability. I have noticed more outages in the last six months than in the previous two years and these are mainly down to the development of new features and the new look twitter which has been widely welcomed and that was highlighted in an a poll today by Mashable.

I think we have all become accustomed to things working all of the time but the fact is these social networks are complicated pieces of kit that have taken years to develop and you can take that from someone who has been developing a twitter management application for almost nine months. However, that said should we now expect our social tools to be reliable all of the time? And does this change if the service is free like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Doplr? Or do we all accept that web applications break from time to time and this is now the norm?

I have my own views but let me know what you think – thanks.

Cross posted on Dead Dinosaur.

Twitoaster – A twitter tool for threaded conversations

This week I have been using a tool I found called twitoaster. Basically it helps you see the threads of your conversations in one place and gives you a few statistics from your tweets.

This is how it pitches itself:

“Twitoaster threads and archives your twitter conversations, bringing you all the background, context and statistics you need. It’s all about improving & optimizing the way you communicate with your followers. It groups replies and retweets with the tweets that inspired them, displaying threaded discussions. Twitoaster provides analytics and statistics, helping you to tweet at the right time. It also archives and indexes all your conversations in a conversational search engine.”

This tool is the brainchild of Arnaud Meunier from Paris who now works for Twitter, so he must have done his job on this application pretty well. However, he made this great tool back in 2009 and is now focussed on his work with Twitter (According to the blog) so it says the application is unlikely to evolve much.

I think this is a useful little twitter application that presents your conversations easily. On the downside I think the RT statistics it presents could be a little out as the way Twitter produces these did change recently. So I think it might miss some of those, however, that said for a free application I think it is worth a play. One of my favourite elements is the graphs that tell you the best day of the week and hour of the day although for us these statistics were a little out.

What do you think of Twitoaster?

Twitter management tools – why did they remove bulk unfollow tools?

For the last nine months I have been working on creating a Twitter management application that added value to the Twitter experience. The application, called Tweasier, is currently in beta testing and has several hundred people using it on a daily basis – I have found their feedback absolutely invaluable and I now recognise the importance of having a beta period. During these nine months I have seen a variety of Twitter applications have their services or features throttled by Twitter and I have been asking myself why?

A good example of this was Twitter Karma which allowed the average Twitter user to sort their friends by people who were following them back. It was a useful tool which meant that you could cleanse your account from time to time and keep the numbers down to a reasonable and manageable level. Sometimes people you follow, just stop using Twitter altogether, so a spring clean can be effective.

As Twitter has grown, so has the noise in an average users Twitter account. The early adopters of Twitter used to see pretty much everybody’s tweets but now, as there are so many interesting and insightful people out there to follow, you can occasionally miss an important tweet or two. For a news junkie like myself I hate to think that but that’s the way it is on Twitter these days and we have all come to accept it.

Too Many Fail Whales

Twitter has had a bit of a bad run recently launching a few new features which have stumbled and cause the network to break down on regular occasions. Sometimes I actually feel I might as well start having a relationship with the FAIL WHALE as I see him more often that my own account. However, this has prompted Twitter to reduce the limit of requests third-party-applications like Tweasier, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can make it to its API (down to 175).

By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network.

My Advice to Twitter

So my first bit of advice to Twitter is to sort the stability of the network out and return the trust to the users and the developers which have helped make Twitter as popular as it is toady.

My second piece of advice is to re-examine bringing back bulk unfollowing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not a spammer and I don’t believe in spamming but surely there is a better way to stop Twitter spammers than removing the usefulness of bulk unfollowing from all third-party applications.

Twitter actually changed its rules and now only allows single line unfollowing. In my opinion this is wrong, so please bring back features like bulk unfollowing, so the regular users can trim their accounts when they need trimming otherwise it makes it a far harder process to spring clean an account and people will be following dead accounts which is surely a bad thing for Twitter anyway.

My answer to stopping the spammers is simple, when a users syncs their account with an application their details are kept in the user’s profile. Why then can’t Twitter just have something that flags up when an account is growing and reducing at an alarming rate using one of these applications? Ban these guys whose accounts fluctuate and keep the users happy by giving us back a useful features.

I would love to offer Tweasier’s users the capacity to select all but the way the rules stand that won’t be the case for some time.

TweetedBrands.com which Brands are Popular on Twitter

Hi folks, it’s nice to be back posting on Tweasier. Today, I bring you a very simple but very useful Twitter application website and it’s called TweetedBrands. TweetedBrands, shows you what brands have been mentioned the most on Twitter. You can view the information for Today, Last Week or Last Month.

Find out which 50 top brands are popular now

Not surprisingly, BP is one of the most popular brands being mentioned at the moment due to the current oil spill situation.  The usual popular suspects are in there Youtube, Twitter, Facebook. The most popular consumer brand is Apple, it was top last month with a staggering 4,006,752 Tweets, Apple has a very loyal and dedicated fan base on Twitter. I still can’t understand Apple’s reluctance to capitalise on this situation. They did launch a couple of Twitter account for iTunes, but Apple really doesn’t have a main company presence on Twitter at this time.

If you click on the hyperlinked number of Tweets, it nicely sends you to Twitter search for ‘all mentions’ of the brand or company. Pretty useful, if your analysing the conversations or sentiment around that particular brand or company.

Interesting findings

I’m finding this website fascinating, for example Today (4th of July) Zara (European clothing Retailer, popular here in the UK) has had 2,609 Tweets mentioning that brand. It is interesting to note from my own personal love of the brand that there approach to online marketing hasn’t been too effective of late. Unlike, most UK high street retail brands they have been slow on the uptake of social media and don’t even sell online. They could really be captalising on these conversations happeing around their brand, as far as I am aware they don’t have a presence on Twitter either.

Check out TweetedBrands.com for yourself, who are you suprised to see on there? Which brands haven’t made the cut and which did you think might of?

Which brands do think use social media effectively on Twitter? We’d love to hear you thoughts.

About this blog post
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, then you can take a look at Illiya’s other posts on his blog or follow him on Twitter.

New Twitter tool needs your feedback

At Tweasier we are busy finalising our Twitter application but we need your help to tell us what features you would really want from a Twitter application.

We also want to hear what you like about our current version and what you think could be improved. We will be spending the next few weeks using all of your feedback to hopefully create a Twitter application that adds real value to the Twitter experience but we simply can’t do it without your help.

I will be filming a series of walkthrough videos of the features, so here’s a 2 minute taster of our search function which is pretty useful.

If you want to join the fun and get involved in our exclusive beta programme click here and register your email.