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Squawq Analytics – Term metrics for Twitter

Published on Dec. 17, 2009
by Kyle

There is a lot of noise on Twitter; we figured that out fast as our servers filled up with gigabytes of data (just text) the first day, while monitoring only a handful of popular terms. A few months ago, I began discussing this concept with Jason Striegel, we knew there was a need, especially for brands, to make sense of what is happening on Twitter, see what people are saying and how much they are saying it.
Our research phase discovered tools that had some of the similar objectives as us and we were shocked by their short-comings. The most annoying trend was the inability to give real metrics. Sites like Twitscoop plot your term with a near-meaningless scale of 1 to 5 on their “BuzzMeter,” and I was surprised by the complete UX #fail Radian6 developed, and charges a premium for. Note: this is not to say that Radian6 does not have good qualities. Their application’s scope is larger than that of Squawq and offers a lot of valuable information regarding a brand’s reputation in social media. More below.

It only takes minutes with Jason, for a seedling to turn into a giant beanstalk; and Squawq was born. Well, I guess there was all of the pain-staking work in the middle that made it a reality, a lot of which I was spared. A lot of hard work was done by Zara Gonzalez, Andrew Wetzel, Grant Eull, Andrew Charon, Braden Stadlman, Aaron Clark and Julie Kaloides and so many others. Thanks to their hard work, Squawq provides a lot of answers.

Squawq does a lot (soon it will do even more). It stores information about your terms so you can view its activity over a custom date range (most tools won’t show you past 3 days), it extracts common keywords, #tags and @authors associated with your terms, finds your most vocal authors (the people talking about your brand), and provides you with links mentioned in their tweets and more.

Heres an example of how I have been using Squawq. One of the terms I decided I was interested in was trends surrounding Actionscript 3 and Flash. Below you can see their activity between December 10th and December 16th, 2009, and you can see that Tweets dropped a lot on Sunday, the 13th. In one week the term was mentioned 590 times, Tuesday and Wednesday were the most active days (true to all Twitter communication as well). I was a little surprised to see the amount of self-promotion involved on these terms. Several users posted links to their latest article over and over. Since watching this term, it has been easy for me to see what is exciting the flash community the most on any given day; it has also become a good way to stay on top of any new exciting libraries that people are talking about. For example, Voice Gesture an article recently posted on ByteArray.org has been getting a lot attention on Twitter. It demonstrates a new Voice Recognition library built leveraging new features for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

Squawq has already provided me with countless insights into communities and brands I am interested in, and it will just get better as it keeps collecting data. So this year, at Colle + McVoy we are giving the gift of data. Giving our clients a way to measure what is being said about them at a time when that really matters.

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