Topsy: A Twitter Search and Analytics Tool

With billions of tweets being posted on Twitter every hour, a free twitter search tool is definitely very handy. Introducing Topsy, which unlike the usual Twitter Search, is a tool that allows marketers to search for tweets from the date of inception of Twitter all the way back from 2007. Topsy allows marketers to track their brand on twitter, analyze how content is being shared (whether through links, photos, videos, or plain text), who are the active participants in the tweets, the key influencers and the sentiments over the brand over time. “How do you make sense of 400 billion pieces of content?” said Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “By ranking it. We do that ranking by looking at how much a particular piece of content is being cited by other people.”

Website: http://www.topsy.com

About: A San Francisco Start up, Topsy is a  Twitter search and analytic tool that helps marketers know their place in the active social media.

Price: Free for the basic Topsy Search, Topsy Pro for a $12000 per user.

Key Features

1. Review All Tweets

One of the basic feature of a twitter search tool, Topsy allows its users to review and analyze all the tweets followed by a domain name, hashtag, or twitter profile name. This can also be done on Twitter search but that would give a glimpse of tweets limited to two or three numbers based on the recent tweets. Topsy, on the other hand would display all the tweets pertaining to the particular search.

2. Who Are Your Influencers?

Knowing who really is interested in you and your business can come very handy for a marketer. The \’Influencers\’ feature of Topsy helps you with just that! Upon clicking the \’influencers\’ tab, you get to see the top influencers of your company or search category. The people who who make the most mentions about you or your search topic. Here, I found the five names that influenced Beta21 in the past 30 days.

3. Reviewing Mentions

One of the most beneficial attributes of Topsy, you get access to exactly how many times a person or twitter user had mentioned you in his/her tweets allowing you to know exactly who you are influencing and to what extent. Just search using your username and then the topic. Here below is an example of how many times I mentioned Beta21 in my tweets in the past 30 days!

4. Know Your Reach

For a Social Media Manager, it is important to know how many people talked about their reviews and articles. That, is made fairly simple by simply adding the domain name of the article on the search index and you get access to the number of tweets your link was mentioned in and how many tweets were influential enough.

5. Tracking and Analytics

With Topsy\’s free social analytic tool, you can gather information about the trends the tweets take of one or more domains or twitter profiles. This is a great advantage for knowing the trends and popularity of your profile in the social media.

Given below is an example of how many times the link www.beta21.circussocial.com was mentioned on twitter as compared to the profile Beta21.

The User Interface

Topsy has a fairly simple UI which is as easy as typing the keywords in a search index. “By adding a full historical index, now we can look even further back to the very first tweets 7 years ago, meaning our users have access to the best, most accurate view of the world’s social conversation,” Prakash said in a statement.

The New York Times has reported that Topsy, based in San Francisco, has indexed every Twitter message since the first tweet was posted in 2006 — about 425 billion pieces of content, including photos. Topsy\’s free service offers a limited archive, but the pro version unlocks them all for a cost.

What About Their Competitors?

What makes Topsy stand out is the fact that Twitter themselves use the Topsy Analytics for its Twitter Oscars index that tried to predict the winners from many of its twitter chatters. Topsy thus, must definitely be doing something right! Competitors like DataSift and Gnip also offer access to the Twitter archive shared Prakash, although their ability to deliver real-time information is more limited.  Others (likeRadian6) have a large amount of data which anyway are not easy to find. Furthermore, creating reports is too cumbersome there. But with Topsy, report generation takes seconds, not minutes.

Topsy has many benefits. From granting access to every single tweet from the start of twitter, to immediate access to results and multiple ways to analyze data, the Topsy search and analytic tool comes definitely as a boon!