TweetReach Blog

The results are in – the Golden Globes were held last night and the Twitter traffic was off the charts! TweetReach, in partnership with mhCarter Consulting and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, tracked and analyzed all of the tweets during the broadcast of the 69th annual awards show.

We watched for all mentions of Golden Globes during the broadcast and with close to 1 million tweets from almost 300,000 contributors generating over 2.2 billion impressions, the results came in at three times the Twitter volume we saw in 2011.

While “The Artist” and “The Descendants” walked away with most of the awards, what tweets drove the buzz? Check out the infographic below for the details!

We’re very excited to announce that we’re partnering with mhCarter Consulting and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to track tweets about the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, January 15, 2012.

Jenn will be tweeting live from the event in Los Angeles on Sunday, and we’ll post the final Twitter analysis here on our blog next week.

Last year, we tracked tweets about the 2011 Golden Globe Awards. Glee dominated Twitter during last year’s show, generating the most retweets and highest spikes in conversation volume throughout the event. Other popular topics included The Social Network, Toy Story 3, The Big Bang Theory, Natalie Portman and Justin Bieber. Overall, we tracked 300,000 tweets with a reach of 31.5 million during the three-hour broadcast in 2011. The 2012 show is already on track to be much bigger.

The 68th Golden Globes were a lot of fun last year and we can’t wait to see what people will be tweeting about this year. Our early bets? Ricky Gervais will certainly cause a stir as the show’s host; he’s already generating a lot of buzz and averaging more than 300 retweets per tweet. Ryan Gosling has been the subject of hundreds of Tumblrs during the past few months and is nominated in two categories, so he’ll probably garner some attention at the event. Glee will likely make a strong showing again this year, as Twitter historically loves Glee and other shows targeted to a young adult audience. What do you think? Got any predictions for popular Twitter trends during this year’s Golden Globes telecast?

Read our full press release here.

Today, we’re happy to announce general availability of the TweetReach API. For those of you who participated in the beta – thanks for your input and feedback! Available now for TweetReach Pro subscribers at the Plus, Premium, and Max levels (and to those of you who participated in the beta), the TweetReach API provides read-only programmatic access to TweetReach Tracker metrics.

So what does this mean for you? It means you can automate the process of importing TweetReach data into your periodic reporting or easily connect TweetReach to your other internal systems. We know that many of our customers have analysts but may not have full-time developers on staff. Don’t worry, we’ve designed our API to be easy to use from tools like Excel Web Queries so your team can pull TweetReach data directly into your Excel-based reports. However, if you do have a developer, we think you’ll appreciate the RESTful simplicity and choice of XML or JSON responses that make our API easy to use from any programming environment.

So what can you do with the TweetReach API?

• Get a list of all Trackers that have been configured in your TweetReach Pro account along with their summary reach, exposure, activity and contributors metrics.
• Get data about a specific Tracker. This can be used to provide a summary rollup of reach, exposure, activity and contributor metrics or a trend rollup by day, week or month.
• Get a list of all contributors within a Tracker including their exposure, activity, retweets, retweet rate, total exposure and amplification multiplier metrics.

If you’re ready to get started, check out our API Documentation for everything you need to get going. And, as always, we’d love to hear your feedback!

We often use TweetReach to track the success rates of TV shows and other major media events. We thought it would be interesting to analyze the tweets during last night’s Iowa Caucuses for the Republican nomination for President. As you know by now, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum by just a few votes, and Ron Paul came in third. Could Twitter activity have been used to predict the winner?

Last Friday, we started tracking all tweets that mentioned any of a candidate’s Twitter accounts (personal and campaign), the major news networks’ coverage of the caucuses, and hashtags such as #iacaucus that were used by the major news media and others in their tweets.

Interestingly, the overall Twitter volume about the caucuses was pretty low. In fact, we often track more tweets in an hour about a single TV show than we have in five days about all nine candidates. Nevertheless, early on in the evening we predicted a win by Mitt Romney or Ron Paul based on early Twitter activity and retweets.

Overall tweet volume, the number of unique contributors (people who have tweeted about a topic), reach, exposure, and the retweet rate (average number of retweets per tweet) can be useful indicators for deciding what topics are most popular on Twitter. But can they help predict results in Iowa? Here’s how the data shook out for the six major candidates:

Based on overall reach, Romney, Santorum, and Paul came in as the top three candidates, mapping directly to the final caucus results. Based on this analysis, reach seems to be a good indicator of success. But, since much of this reach can be attributed to mentions by major news media accounts, it’s more likely that Twitter activity is merely descriptive of what is happening. Nevertheless, the percentage of total reach from the major candidates ended up being very close to the actual caucus results:

Also noteworthy, despite having over 2.5x the tweet activity of Romney or Santorum, Ron Paul only had the third highest reach. Paul also had over 1.5x the contributors and the highest retweet rate of the candidates, more likely an indication of his support among younger voters and their engagement on Twitter. But, a larger follower count and more activity on Twitter don’t necessarily help predict a winner.

Other fun facts, the most retweeted tweet in our analysis came from Ron Paul’s account, and mentions Jon Huntsman who didn’t actively campaign in Iowa:

And, the second-most retweeted tweet came from Robert Reich, professor at University of California at Berkeley and former United States Secretary of Labor:

Studies have shown that Americans use social media to follow politics. As the primary season unfolds, we’ll continue to analyze the Twitter activity of the major candidates and report back on what we find. In the mean time, we’d love your feedback!

The TweetReach support team will be around to answer all of your questions throughout the final weeks of 2011. However, please allow us a little extra time to return your inquiries on the following days, as we may be stuffing our faces with holiday treats and spending time with our families.

Thursday, December 22 – Sunday, December 25

During this time, we will return all urgent requests as soon as possible and non-urgent requests within 24-36 hours. As always, you can get in touch with us in many ways, but the best way to reach us over the holiday is via email.

• Email us at support [at] appozite [dot] com
• Call us at 888-834-8113
• Submit a ZenDesk ticket
• Find us on Twitter or Facebook

Happy holidays!

We’re so very excited to announce the all-new TweetReach Report 2.0! With a brand new look and some great new metrics, the updated, upgraded version of our snapshot report is smarter and better than ever.

Believe it or not, we ran our very first TweetReach report in April 2009. And in the two and half years since that first report, we’ve run millions and millions of reports for customers all over the world. But the report hasn’t really changed much since then. Until now, that is. We’ve given the entire report a massive facelift and added in a lot of the metrics you’ve been asking us for. Take a look…

New Report Changes

Some of our favorite new report features include:

• Top tweets make it easy to identify the most retweeted tweets
• Top contributors make it easy to identify the most influential and engaged participants
• Graphical timeline makes it easy to identify when key moments occurred throughout the duration of the conversation
• Integrated contextual help makes it easy to figure out what a metric means and how we calculate it

We haven’t removed anything from the old report; we’ve only added to it. And there won’t be an increase in cost for these new reports – quick 50-tweet reports are still free, and full reports are still $20. (As always, full reports will include all tweets made available by Twitter, which is usually up to 1,500 tweets from the past week.)

New Report Access

For the next few weeks, the new report will only be available to anyone who purchases a full report or anyone with a TweetReach Pro subscription or a free TweetReach account. So to try it out, either sign in to your current account or sign up for a free TweetReach account.

There’s more information in our helpdesk about the new report with detailed explanations of the new metrics, as well as list of new report FAQs. And please let us know if you have any questions!

Welcome back to This Week in Social Analytics, our ongoing summary of some of our favorite posts from the past week in the world of measurement, analytics and social media. Enjoy!

How to create social media metrics that matter
Over at Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog, Steve Goldner provides some concrete examples of how to obtain and retain social media commitment from clients.

Making Business Decisions Through Data
David Armano and Chuck Hemann co-wrote this piece that presents two different models for decision making based on listening to online conversations in real-time and acting on insights gathered from the data.

Social Media Metrics that Matter and Outcomes Analysis
Keith Burtis encourages marketers to stop worrying about aggregate data that don’t affect results. Focus instead on metrics that matter — those that drive conversions that are important to your business.

How to Measure Social Media ROI Like the Experts
Corey Eridon at Hubspot gives several tips on how to measure social media success, from initial visit to conversion across all of your social networks.

The Most Powerful Social Media Measurement Tool Money Can Buy
Amber Naslund suggests that despite all of the wonderful social media measurement tools out there, the best way to analyze your metrics is to use good old human-powered critical thinking. Use the best tool for the job, but use your brain to gain insights from the data.

We recently upgraded the contributor metrics available in our TweetReach Pro Trackers. Among other metrics we’re now surfacing are new contributor amplification measures, including amplified impressions and an amplification multiplier.

Our objective with these new contributor metrics is to help you find people who are driving conversation and engagement around your campaign or brand. Because, depending on your goals, there probably isn’t one single influence metric that completely captures the contributions of your most important, active participants. So we present you with several contributor metrics:

• Tweets
• Direct Impressions
• Retweets
• Retweet Rate
• Total Exposure
• Amplification Multiplier

RT rate is the average number of retweets per tweet a contributor has posted. This metric is useful for finding people who have contributed to the spread of a message and who have engaged followers. Look at this number in relation to the total number of tweets this contributor has posted.

The amplification multiplier represents the spread of a tweet through retweets. If the original tweet generated 100 direct impressions, and retweets generated 150 additional impressions, then that tweet generated 250 total impressions, resulting in an amplification multiplier of 1.5x the original tweet. For each contributor, this number is calculated as an average for all their tweets in this Tracker. If a participant did not receive any retweets, then that person will not have an amplification multiplier, since her tweets were not amplified. Generally, anyone with an amplification multiplier of 1.2x or higher is doing quite well at spreading conversation. And sometimes you’ll see someone with a huge amplification multiplier – 100x or more. Generally, this person did not generate many direct impressions, but was retweeted by someone with a large following. If a number looks like an outlier, it probably is, so check that person’s other metrics to see what’s causing this spike.

To find influential people in your Tracker, take a look at all of these contributor metrics. Use tweets to find your most active advocates. Use direct impressions to find people with a lot of followers. Use RT rate to find people with an active, engaged following. Use the amplification multiplier to find people with a large secondary audience. Together, you should be able to develop a list of engaged, influential and passionate advocates for your campaign or brand.

You can also drill in to view an individual contributor’s details by clicking on their username anywhere in your Tracker. On the contributor detail page, you’ll find all kinds of information about that Twitter user, as seen here:

The TweetReach support team will be around to answer all of your questions throughout the Thanksgiving holiday. However, please allow us a little extra time to return your calls and emails on Thursday, November 24 and Friday, November 25, as we’re likely to be stuffing our faces with turkey and cranberry sauce (or sleeping off our resulting tryptophan comas).

During this time, we will return all urgent requests as soon as possible and non-urgent requests within 24 hours. As always, you can get in touch with us in many ways, but email is the best way to reach us over the holiday (aren’t smartphones great?).

• Email us at support [at] appozite [dot] com
• Call us at 888-834-8113
• Submit a ZenDesk ticket
• Find us on Twitter or Facebook

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello again from This Week in Social Analytics, our ongoing summary of some of our favorite posts from the week in the world of measurement, analytics and social media. Enjoy!

Flipping the Funnel: The Four Levels of Influence
Tom Webster suggests that marketers have it backwards by focusing on influencers. Instead, perhaps we should pay more attention to the influenced and on creating brand advocates.

Number of Fans and Followers is NOT a Business Metric – What You Do With Them Is
Jeremiah Owyang reminds us that vanity metrics don’t matter — business that comes from fans and followers are what is important.

Top 10 Takeaways from #ACCELERATE
Last week, a great group of #measure pros met at Web Analytics Demystified’s #ACCELERATE conference in San Francisco. In this post, Michele Hinojosa lays out her top 10 takeaways from the event.

Analysts, and executives, and monkeys. Oh My!
Lee Isensee summarizes some of his thoughts from the #ACCELERATE conference as well as the recent eMetrics conference and warns that analysts must not become isolated as “web analysts” and move beyond just analyzing data and building reports.

Gilligan Meets Super #ACCELERATE — Recreated
And in another #ACCELERATE wrap up post, check out Tim Wilson’s awesome presentation, and yes, it’s in rhyme.