Doing Research using Twitter

This is a follow up post to The Twitter Phenomenon and useful Tools. It is about researching Twitter and about doing research by using Twitter. With over one million users there is a remarkable user base, which is large enough to research buzz at the social media sphere. The term buzz describes hot topics and trends at the live and social web. This especially is due as the user base often is deeply connected with other social media services.

For buzz monitoring there are a couple of services ready to use. One service to do so is TwitScoop. The buzz is shown by a tag cloud and hot topics are listed at the side. To get information about a special topic there is a search function. With Twist there is a tool for trend research. It lists the number of post by a timeline and enables to compare subjects and topics.

Twitter is a micro blogging service. This limits a message or posting to 160 characters and links to further information and sources are most important. By this the same is due to measuring the number and the popularity of links. To do so there are TwitterBuzz and Twitturly.

Another very nice service to get an insight in what is important at local areas is Twitter Local. This service enables to find information posted about cities or geographic areas. A very useful tool for monitoring local issues is the feed generator offered, which enables everyone to receive a newsfeed just with relevant local posts.

Beside doing research about and on Twitter there is a service enabling own reseach and polls on Twitter. This is StrawPoll. You can see some results at the StrawPoll homepage. Current polls may become watch by the StrawPoll Blog.

Last but not least there is the statistics page at the official Twitter blog to see what is going on within the community. To have a look at the stats of a particular account you may use TweetStats.