Like stones tossed for years onto a pile, Twitter’s 140-character tweets over the last nine years have created a mountain of hundreds of billions of user moments.
To make sense of the mountain, social analytics firm Union Metrics is today announcing a new tool called Echo that offers real-time, interactive access to the full Twitter archive. It utilizes the Twitter Full-Archive Search API that was announced in August.
The usefulness of this Tweetapalooza, CEO Hayes Davis told me, is the discovery of social patterns that a more shallow social analysis cannot detect. Since news propagates quickly on Twitter, for instance, a brand might be able to see exactly when a particular news story — such as one that precipitated a crisis for that company — began and the arc it took.
He pointed to client company Digitas Health LifeBrands, which might want to understand the kinds of language users have employed over the last decade to discuss, say, Type 2 diabetes. Or a company might wish to analyze a competitor’s social traction and the implicit social strategy.
Davis said that his company’s clients in the TV industry are using Echo to watch viewer reaction on a minute-by-minute basis to programming or ad campaigns.
Another application might be to better understand the social half-lives of tweets relating to a topic. “Half-life” in this context is a term used to describe the peaks and decays of user engagement.
In addition to showing broad trends and patterns, the tool can also call up sample tweets according to search parameters.
A screen from Union Metrics’ new Twitter archive tool, Echo.
“If you’re going to run a campaign on Twitter,” he said, “you need to understand how audiences are talking” about that topic.
“A lot of marketers have been flying blind,” he said.
Echo and the Twitter archive have been integrated into Union Metrics’ Social Suite product, which analyzes owned and earned posts on Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, in addition to Twitter.
Davis acknowledged that Union Metric is not the only company with access to the full Twitter archive. When it announced the API, Twitter noted that Brandwatch, Sprout Social, SocialBro, Pulsar, NetBase, Livefyre and NUVI are among the companies incorporating full-archive search into their offerings. Davis said that Echo is more flexible and easier to use than others’ tools.
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