Archive for the ‘Guides’ Category
How to use advanced Twitter search queries
Twitter supports a number of advanced search operators and filters that allow you to customize your search query and find exactly the tweets you’re looking for. Here are a few of our favorite Twitter search operators and how to use them (with tons of examples).
Find one keyword OR another
First, Twitter does not require an AND or + operator to search for multiple keywords. So don’t include them. Just type together multiple keywords into your query and Twitter will return tweets that include of those terms. For example:
However, sometimes you might want to find tweets that include one keyword or another keyword. Use the OR operator to separate those terms and your report will include tweets that mention one or the other.
You can also chain together multiple keywords to create a more complex query. The OR operator will attach to the word that immediately precedes it, very much like order of operations in algebra. For example, the following query will find tweets that mention social media metrics or social media analytics, because the OR links to the metrics and analytics terms.
social media metrics OR analytics
@Username queries
There are several ways to learn more about the reach of tweets from a particular Twitter account, depending on the type of information you’re looking for.
- Tweets to, from and about an account - tweetreachapp
Run a report for a username but do not include the @symbol. This will return all mentions of that Twitter account (including retweets and replies), as well as all tweets from that Twitter account. This is the most comprehensive set of reach stats for a specific Twitter account. - Tweets to and about an account – @tweetreachapp
Run a report for a username and include the @symbol. This will return all mentions of an account, but not any tweets from that account. This report will let you know how many people are talking about a certain Twitter account, and the ways they’re talking about it (including all retweets, replies, and mentions). - Tweets to an account – to:tweetreachapp
Run a report using the to: operator and a username. Do not use the @ symbol. This report will return only direct replies to that account (where the username is the first word in the tweet). This reports is useful for learning more about how people talk to that account. - Tweets from an account – from:tweetreachapp
Run a report using the from: operator and a username. Do not use the @ symbol. This report will return only tweets from that account. This reports is useful for measuring the reach of an individual Twitter account, and for learning more about the kinds of tweets that account is posting.
Date filters
You can filter your search results to a particular time period by adding the since: and until: operators to your search query. Use these date filters to narrow down your results. And since you can access up to 1500 tweets per query, if you run a report for each day of a campaign using date filters, you can find more total tweets. For example:
social media since:2011-09-24
@mashable until:2011-09-26
You can use one or both filters in a query. These dates correspond to around 12:00 a.m. UTC, so since filter dates will include tweets from that date, but until filter dates will include tweets up until that date. And no matter what, snapshot reports can only go back about a week, so you still can’t use these filters to access tweets older than a week.
Exclusions
You can exclude certain keywords from your search by adding a minus sign (-) before the keyword. This will filter out all tweets that include that keyword. This is particularly useful if your company/brand/client/product has has a common name and want to exclude mentions of others with that name.
And more…
These are some of our favorite filters and operators, but here’s the full list of advanced search operators if you’re interested in more. One word of advice – Twitter handles fairly simple queries really well, but tends to break with longer and more complex queries. We recommend that you only add in a few advanced operators per query and try to limit the total number of keywords and characters in a search query. Keep it under 5-8 words and 60 characters and you should be fine. And definitely run free TweetReach reports to test out your more complex queries and see what kinds of tweets they find.
If you ever have any questions about search queries and how to get exactly the data you need from Twitter, just ask us! We’re big Twitter search nerds and can help you figure out even the trickiest search queries.
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Interested in learning more about TweetReach? Take a look at our website or contact our sales team for more.
Take a tour of the TweetReach Tracker
If you’re considering signing up for a TweetReach Pro account, take this quick tour to see some of the great Twitter analytics features available through the TweetReach Tracker.
Setting up a TweetReach Tracker
If you’re new to TweetReach Pro, check out this short video about how to get your first Tracker set up. And there’s more information about setting up a Tracker on our helpdesk.
Comparing social media tools: Monitoring, workflow and measurement solutions
Liza Sperling recently wrote a great guest post on oneforty where she compared various social media tools. She included a useful breakdown to help marketers, community managers and others interested in social media understand when they need what kind of tool. While Liza’s taxonomy is really helpful, we think about it a little bit differently. Here’s the way we like to classify social media tools:
If you’re managing brands or clients in social media, there are probably three functions that are of primary importance to your work: monitoring, workflow, and measurement tools. Many tools will fall clearly into one category or another, but there are an increasing number of applications that overlap multiple categories. There aren’t really any tools that do all three things very well, however, so you will probably need to use more than one to accomplish all of these activities, at least for now.
Workflow
Workflow, or engagement, tools help you coordinate multiple social media accounts with multiple authors, allowing you to assign tasks and post updates. These are the communication tools and Twitter clients; if you manage any social media accounts, you’ll probably spend a lot of your time using these kinds of tools. You could also include social CRM applications in this category, as those help organize customers. Our favorites in the workflow category include CoTweet, TweetDeck and HootSuite, but there are tons more in the business dashboard category on oneforty. Many of these workflow tools provide some simple metrics and basic monitoring capabilities, but for more in-depth and comprehensive statistics or listening features, you’ll need to look at tools in the other two categories.
Monitoring
Monitoring (also known as listening and brand tracking) tools help you cut through the mass of social media conversations to get at the ones that mean something to you and your clients. These tools are great for keeping track of what people are saying about a topic, and which conversations are important to participate in or respond to. There are a variety of brand tracking tools listed on oneforty. Many monitoring tools provide some sort of measurement, often through content analysis in an attempt to understand concepts like sentiment and influencers. On the flip side, some measurement tools provide monitoring capabilities; for example, TweetReach Pro is used by a lot of our customers for monitoring brand mentions.
Measurement
Finally, measurement tools analyze social media conversations to put numbers to the chatter. These are all the metrics, statistics, and analysis tools. TweetReach is primarily a measurement tool. This category is probably the most diverse of the three overall social media tools areas. Metrics can be calculated in so many ways for so many stakeholders that each individual measurement tool provides a slightly different spin with its numbers. Because of this, it can be overwhelming trying to choose which metrics tool to use for your particular needs.
And this is why we find it helpful to further break the measurement category down into three more specific areas: paid, owned, and earned media. Forrester recently published research that explains the differences between paid, owned and earned media. I definitely recommend this post if you haven’t read it, but here’s the gist.
- Owned media refers to the sites a company runs – its website, Twitter account, Facebook page, and so on. Owned media metrics tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights help you understand how people are interacting with official sites.
- Paid, or bought, media refers to any advertising or sponsorship, like a sponsored Twitter trend, a Google ad, or any other paid social action. Usually you get some metrics from whomever you purchased the content (like Twitter’s sponsored trend analytics).
- Finally, earned media refers to all the conversation generated from those owned and paid media. This includes word of mouth, spontaneous customer opinion, and any kind of buzz about a brand, product or company that you didn’t pay for or create yourself.
A digital campaign will include elements of all three media types, but you only really control the owned and paid messages. With the earned media conversation, you can simply monitor, respond and measure. Earned media is where TweetReach comes in. Our goal is to help you understand the impact of conversations that spring up in social media about your clients, whether it’s related to a specific campaign or event, or whether it’s the general ambient chatter about a topic that occurs in spaces like Twitter. We want to help you answer questions like:
- What was the reach of a conversation?
- How many people are talking about a topic?
- How many people could have seen tweets about a topic?
- What tweets are generating the most buzz?
- Who is generating the most buzz about a topic?
- How does this week’s buzz compare to last week’s buzz? How about this month’s buzz?
- What conversation did a particular paid campaign spark?
Different measurement tools will provide different metrics in different formats. And many of them can be used in combination with each other and with monitoring and workflow tools. It can be difficult and time-consuming to pick the right tool for your particular needs, but the good news is that the tool you need probably exists. Again, we’ll refer you to oneforty – they currently index nearly 250 social media analytics tools (including TweetReach, hint hint).
Find more relevant and interesting information on Twitter
We all know Twitter is a great place to find helpful information and interesting new ideas. Millions of people share all kinds of things every day. But that’s also one of the biggest problems with Twitter – it’s huge, which makes it nearly impossible to sift through all those tweets to find just the ones you might find useful.
So, here’s one idea to help you use Twitter to quickly and easily find more relevant information about the topics you’re interested in. First, pick a topic. Then run a free TweetReach report with a topic-related keyword and Twitter’s links-only filter.
For example, if you’re interested in social media analytics you could use the following query:
social media measurement filter:links
This query will return only tweets with links, giving you a list of blog posts, articles and websites about social media measurement. This is a great way to learn more about a topic, stay on top of recent news and trends, even find new blogs for your feed reader and interesting Twitter users to follow.
Try it now! And if you need inspiration, check out a few of these reports:
Reach isn’t influence. Keep your umbrella handy.
Recently, we read an interesting blog post from Tom Webster about the limits of online influence as he asked for help supporting the people of Christchurch, New Zealand after the terrible earthquake they experienced. (A very worthy cause. Please help him out!)
He makes a lot of great points in this post about the weaknesses of influencer campaigns on social media like Twitter. While TweetReach doesn’t calculate influence, a number of people use our tools to help determine influence and influencers, so naturally this post grabbed our attention (and he quoted some TweetReach numbers in the post, so that helps too). In general, we agree with Tom’s overall premise – influence is a messy, complicated concept, and far from being fully understood or properly utilized.
Matt Ridings of Techguerilla added this comment to Tom’s post:
I think what you *are* exposing is that in a medium like Twitter, simple reach has very little to do with success. And that is a big thing for people to know indeed.
We absolutely agree. Now, of course everyone wants large numbers for reach or exposure, but they have to be put into context along with action metrics like clicks or actual transactions. Our reach metric, which is the number of unique Twitter accounts that tweets about a topic were delivered to, is a measure of the size of your potential audience. A high reach means a large audience, but it doesn’t guarantee that members of that audience will actually do what they’re asked.
So what is reach good for? We think reach is the universal denominator. It belongs in an equation to normalize other metrics. If reach is the size of your potential audience, how many people actually acted on a tweet? Divide your action metric by that reach. Depending on your goals, that action number could be anything from retweets to clicks to purchases on your website. With reach as a denominator, you can use this number across campaigns and time periods to start to really understand your effectiveness. Without reach to normalize these metrics, you’re flying blind. Clicks were up 20% this week? Great! But is your campaign actually improving if your reach increased by 50%?
Where does this leave influence? Right now the familiar influence metrics essentially work by saying that someone has influenced people to do some social activities in the past and therefore could potentially influence people to do them again. This “potential influence” is a little like predicting the weather by assuming it’ll do the same thing today that it did yesterday. It’s often right, but you frequently end up soaked without an umbrella. The point here is that a message from an “influencer” as part of your campaign is no guarantee that you’ll get results. Your message may not resonate with his or her audience, Twitter might be failwhaling, or it might just be a pretty day and everyone’s outside.
Successful campaigns are about reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time. Those are all difficult things to do but there are a couple approaches that can help. First, you can’t rely solely on algorithms – learn your industry and the true influencers (as humans understand the concept). Develop relationships with them and they’ll help you spread the word. Second, measure, measure, measure. This is where reach and other metrics can truly help because they give you a baseline to measure performance over time so you can try new things and learn from your mistakes. In the end combining these ingredients will help you succeed.
Photo credit: Running through the storm by yooperann
Taking advantage of the free 50-tweet TweetReach report
Every day, thousands of people run a free snapshot report at tweetreach.com. These free snapshot reports analyze up to 50 tweets from the past 3-7 days about any topic. You can search for a keyword, hashtag, URL, username, brand or product name, or any combination of those. You can even filter your results to a specific date or use other advanced search operators. You’ll get a full analysis of those 50 tweets, including metrics about reach, exposure, and contributors and some pretty charts like this one here.
Interpreting Your Results
When interpreting your results, it’s important to remember that the free report shows only the most recent 50 tweets for a search term. So the report you run right now could look very different than the report you ran yesterday, or even an hour ago. Even so, after time, you can start to get a pretty good sense of what kinds of numbers are appropriate for your particular search term. Here are some guidelines for how to interpret your 50-tweet report. We also have a detailed explanation of how to interpret a full 1,500-tweet report.
Exposure
In a 50-tweet report, the overall exposure could be anywhere from a few thousand to a hundred thousand. On average, a free report will generate somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 impressions. If your exposure is more than 50,000 in a 50-tweet report, that’s generally good – your message is spreading. Exposure is our count of total impressions generated by a search term.
Reach
For 50 tweets, reach will likely fall between 1,000 and 100,000. The reach number represents the total number of unique Twitter accounts that tweets about the search query were delivered to – it’s a measure of your potential audience. So, if in 50 tweets, your search term only reached a few thousand people, that’s pretty low. Are most of the tweets @ replies? Are many of the tweets posted by the same person or few people? On average, a 50-tweet report will reach somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people. If your reach is more than 30,000 in a 50-tweet report, that’s great. That likely means one or more well-connected people have tweeted about your topic and a wide variety of different people are tweeting.
Reach:Exposure Ratio
If you divide your exposure number by your reach number, you’ll end up with your reach:exposure ratio, which will fall between 0 and 1. There’s a in-depth discussion of the reach:exposure ratio here, but basically, you want to aim for something 0.2 or higher, with most reports falling between 0.2 and 0.6. The closer this number is to 1.0, the more distinct and separate contributors are represented in this report. That means a variety of people from all over Twitter – each with their own unique set of followers – are tweeting about this topic.
Contributors
Sometimes, a 50-tweet report will include tweets from 50 different people. That’s actually pretty rare; generally, most 50-tweet reports include tweets from 25-45 people. If the number of unique contributors is lower than 20, then one or more people are tweeting repeatedly about your term. Is this something you should be concerned about? It will depend on your situation, so look closely at the top contributors. Is someone spamming his/her followers about this topic?
Tweets
If your search term hasn’t generated 50 tweets in the past few days (i.e., if the free report returns fewer than 50 tweets), why? If you ran a report that only looked for tweets from a specific Twitter account (from:username), then that probably won’t have 50 full tweets in it. But most other terms should get to 50 tweets in a week. What can you do to get more people talking about this topic? Start thinking about what you can do to increase the conversation around this topic.
Report Ideas
You can actually learn a lot about a topic in just 50 tweets. Here are some ideas for how you can use the free report to help measure your impact and get more out of Twitter.
Track your numbers over time. Run a report for your brand or company every morning. Are your metrics growing? Who are your biggest advocates? What can you do to improve these numbers?
Monitor your competitors. Run a report every week for each of your competitors. Enter their stats in a spreadsheet. Use these baseline numbers as a guide to see how you stand up to the competition over time.
Count retweets. The query from:username OR “RT @username” will return tweets from and retweets of a particular Twitter account. It’s a great way to see the reach of your recent tweets and how many retweets you’re generating.
Find new blogs. Search for important keywords for your company or industry and add filter:links to your query. This will return only tweets with links in them, and could lead you to some new reading material.
Watch news spread. Enter a URL or short quote from a press release or blog post you just published. Run a report once an hour to see how the article is spreading around Twitter.
So, what are you waiting for? Give it a try and see how your numbers stack up! It’s totally free to run a 50-tweet report and you we won’t ask you to log in or give us your email address. And if you want more than 50 tweets, you can always buy the full report for your search query, which will include up to 1,500 tweets from the past few days .
What’s your reach:exposure ratio?
No matter the size of your TweetReach report, the report’s reach to exposure ratio (R:E) can tell you a lot about the impact of your tweets. Whether you’ve measured 50 tweets or 50,000 tweets, you can use the ratio of reach to exposure to understand something about how those tweets have spread.
The reach:exposure ratio* represents the depth of penetration of tweets about a topic. A lower R:E suggests that people are seeing tweets about a topic over and over, while higher R:E numbers suggest broad but shallow penetration of that topic. However, a higher R:E does not always indicate success. Depending on the type of tweets you’re measuring and your goals with those tweets, bigger is not always better.
Low R:E = 0.0-0.19
A low reach:exposure number (anything 0.19 or lower) suggests a large percentage of contributors are tweeting multiple times about the hashtag or keyword you’ve measured, which means the message is limited in scope and is not spreading far beyond those people’s followers. A number of people are receiving many tweets about this term.
Low ratios are fine in many cases, however. For example, regional issues and local news events, conferences, and Twitter chats, parties and contests are likely to fall in this range. And that’s perfectly reasonable for these types of events; they’re relevant to a smaller or localized audience and that’s who will see it.
If you’re aiming for a larger or more diverse audience, then start thinking of ways to get tweets about your topic out to a wider audience. What can you do to encourage more (and different) people to tweet? You should also be concerned if your R:E ratio is below 0.05. That suggests that someone is tweeting a lot about your keyword, to the point of being spammy.
Average R:E = 0.2-0.59
An moderate or normal ratio will be anywhere between 0.2 and 0.59. This suggests a normal distribution of tweets, retweets, and amplification. In this case, some people are tweeting multiple times, some influencers are tweeting to lots of followers, and most people are tweeting once or twice to their smaller set of followers. Most people will receive 2-5 tweets about your message.
Many general brand mentions and large product launches or announcements (Verizon iPhone, Chevy Volt) will fall in this range. Larger media events with a wide, popular appeal (like the Academy Awards and Super Bowl) will fall in this range, as well.
High R:E = 0.6-0.99
The closer this reach:exposure number gets to 1, the more different contributors are represented in this report. Ratios of 0.6 or higher indicate that a wide variety of different people are tweeting to a number of diverse followers, spreading the message far and wide. Most people are not seeing more than one or two tweets about the hashtag or keyword. This is ideal if you want a large amplification of your message.
Twitter trends and popular hashtag memes (#LessAmbitiousMovies, #FollowFriday), significant national or international news events, and very big-name products and brands will fall in this range.
Depending on how many contributors and tweets you measured, high ratios could be somewhat misleading. If your report includes just a few hundred tweets and you have a R:E ratio of 0.8, then one or two people with large followings can account for a great deal of this ratio. The smaller the dataset, the larger the impact a few people can have on the R:E ratio.
You should also be concerned if this number is higher than 0.85 or so (which is incredibly rare). This indicates that most people only received one tweet about this message, which might not bode well for retention. How likely are people to remember something if they only read about it once? And if only one tweet about a topic is delivered to a person’s Twitter client, it’s very possible that person did not even see it at all.
*To calculate the reach:exposure ratio, the formula is reach divided by exposure. You should get a number between 0 and 1 (if it’s higher than 1, then you probably used exposure divided by reach). For example, a recent report reached 147,425 people and had an exposure of 763,506 impressions. The R:E ratio is 147,425 / 763,506 = 0.19.
Note: We’ve written up a comprehensive set of full report benchmarks if you want more info about other metrics besides R:E.
Photo credit: Loud Speaker by paparatti.
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Interested in learning more about TweetReach? Take a look at our website or contact our sales team for more.
Benchmark metrics for full TweetReach reports
One of the questions we’re asked every day is, “How do I know if my TweetReach report numbers are good enough?” Raw metrics can be useful, but to be truly valuable they need to be evaluated in context.
Of course, we generally don’t recommend that you compare your social media results to others’. There are so many variables that play into a tweet’s or campaign’s reach that there is no single benchmark that applies to every situation. However, it is helpful for you to know what sorts of TweetReach numbers are appropriate in general, and how to interpret your particular results. Additionally, we recommend that you run regular reports and compare your metrics over time (you can also do this automatically with a TweetReach Tracker).
So, on to the numbers. Below are several benchmarks you can use to understand the impact of your full TweetReach reports (some of these metrics will also apply to the free 50-tweet reports, but we’ll be publishing another post soon that specifically addresses free reports). An individual full report will include up to the most recent 1,500 tweets from the past week. We used data from a large set of reports that hit that 1,500-tweet maximum in the past 12 months for the following metrics.
Reach and Exposure
In a full report (1,500 tweets), you’ll likely see reach and exposure numbers like the following:
Reach
Low: 100,000 or less
Average: 200,000-600,000
High: 1,000,000 or more
Exposure (Impressions)
Low: 300,000 or less
Average: 1,500,000-2,500,000
High: 5,000,000 or more
The reach and exposure numbers will vary from report to report, depending on context. A report for a one-hour Twitter party will be different from a report for a three-day conference, which will be different from a report for a press release or a news event. But the above numbers are a good approximation of an appropriate baseline for any report.
If your numbers are low, look for contributors who were tweeting many times to a small amount of followers; this could be perceived as spammy to their followers. Higher reach numbers indicate that more unique people were potentially reached with tweets about your message.
Reach:Exposure Ratio
More important than the reach and exposure numbers on their own is the number of people reached compared to the overall impressions generated. No matter how many tweets are in your report, this reach:exposure ratio is an important one to interpret.
Low: 0.0-0.2
Average: 0.2-0.4
High: 0.6-0.9
A low reach:exposure number (anything 0.2 or lower) suggests a large number of contributors are tweeting multiple times about the hashtag or keyword, so the message is not spreading far beyond those people’s followers and a number of people are possibly being inundated by tweets about this term. Low ratios are fine in many cases (for example, reports about regional issues will likely be between 0.1 and 0.2), but you should be concerned if you see numbers below 0.05. That suggests that someone is tweeting a lot about your keyword, to the point of being spammy.
An average or moderate ratio would be anywhere between 0.2 and 0.4. This suggests a normal distribution of tweets, retweets, and amplification. In this case, some people are tweeting multiple times, some influencers are tweeting to lots of followers, and most people are tweeting once or twice to their smaller set of followers. Most people will see 2-5 tweets about your message. This is exactly the range we expect most reports to fall in and it’s totally appropriate.
The closer this reach:exposure number gets to 1, the more diversity in contributors to this report. Ratios of 0.6 or higher indicate that a wide variety of different people are tweeting to a number of diverse followers, spreading the message far and wide. Most people are not seeing more than one or two tweets about the hashtag or keyword. This is ideal if you want amplification of your message. You should only be concerned if this number is higher than 0.85 or so (which is incredibly rare). This indicates that most people are only seeing one tweet about this message, which does not bode well for retention. Most people will likely forget about something if they only see it once.
Contributors
Low: 200 or less
High: 1,000 or more
A report for a Twitter party or hashtag chat will generally include tweets from fewer than 300 contributors. This is perfectly fine – over a short time period like an hour or two, a few hundred people in an organized chat or party will easily generate 1,500 tweets. If you’re tracking more general brand or product mentions and your 1,500-tweet report includes fewer than 200 contributors, then you should look at who’s talking (and how much), and what other things you can be doing to encourage your message to spread. In this case, it’s quite possible a few people are talking a lot about one thing in particular, and you might want to investigate that.
A larger brand or a longer-term or high-visibility event should generate higher contributor numbers. If your report include recent general mentions of a common brand name, for example, you’d expect to see at least 1,300 contributors in a 1,500-tweet report, suggesting that most people mention the brand once, then move on. A big product launch or popular press release should generate at least 1,000 contributors.
Tweet Types
Low retweets: 200 or fewer
Average retweets: 300-500
High retweets: 650 or more
Most reports will include mostly regular tweets, like the pie chart on the left. In fact, most reports include 50% to 75% standard (non-reply, non-retweet) tweets. That’s roughly 700-1,100 regular tweets in a report.
A report for a Twitter party or hashtag conversation will likely include a large percentage of @ replies, like the pie chart on the right. This suggests the message is not spreading much beyond the people engaging in the conversation. To help to message spread beyond that circle next time, you could explicitly encourage participants to retweet or tweet directly, instead of @ replying.
For a useful general benchmark, look at the number of retweets your report includes. Most reports include a few hundred retweets; usually about 20% – 35% of all tweets in a report are retweets, as both the pie charts demonstrate. Very, very few reports have more than 50% retweets. If your goal is to spread a message as far as possible, aim for higher numbers of retweets.
Hopefully these approximate benchmarks will help you interpret your full TweetReach report. We’ll be posting more benchmarks for free quick reports and Trackers soon, as well as more detailed discussions about data for different contexts, so check back in for those posts.
Should you run a TweetReach report or set up a Tracker?
We currently offer two TweetReach reporting formats – the individual snapshot report and the Tracker. One of our most frequently asked questions is when it’s appropriate to run an individual report and when it’s best to set up a Tracker. Depending on the type of data you’re analyzing, one of these two formats will better serve your needs. To decide if you need to set up a Tracker or run a snapshot report, just answer three quick questions about the tweets you’re measuring.
1. When are/were the tweets posted?
a) Recently posted
b) Will be posted in the future
If you answered a, you should run a report now. Twitter only keeps tweets accessible for about a week, so if your tweets are older than that, we can’t retrieve them for analysis. Don’t lose them!
If you answered b, move on to question 2.
2. How many tweets do you expect?
a) Fewer than 1,500 tweets
b) More than 1,500 tweets
If you answered a, then you can run a snapshot report after your event has occurred. The snapshot report uses the Twitter Search API, which searches through the most recent seven days worth of tweets. So run that report after, but within one week of, the time period you wish to measure. If you need to measure more than a week’s worth of tweets, see question 3. A snapshot report can include up to 1,500 tweets. If you have 50 or fewer tweets, your report will be free. If it’s between 51 and 1,500 tweets, it’s $20.
If you answered b, you’ll need to set up a Tracker, which can track more than 1,500 tweets. Set up your Tracker before your event begins, or as soon as you can, so we capture as many tweets as possible. The Tracker uses Twitter’s Streaming API, so it captures tweets in real time, as they are posted to Twitter.
3. What is the time period for your analysis?
a) 0-7 days
b) A week or longer
If you answered a, you can run a snapshot report or a Tracker, depending on your answers to questions 1 & 2.
If you answered b, you need to set up a Tracker before your event begins, or as soon as you can. Trackers run in real time, so they will find all new tweets as they are posted to Twitter, but they cannot retrieve old tweets.
In sum: if you answered a to all three questions, run a snapshot report. If you answered b to all three questions, set up a Tracker. For other a/b combinations, check the chart below.
*A few disclaimers about these particular combinations… Snapshot reports include up to 1,500 tweets from the past week, so if you have more than 1,500 tweets or data older than 7 days, we won’t be able to find all of your tweets for analysis. You can run an individual snapshot report anytime at tweetreach.com. Trackers monitor tweets in real time, so they will find all new tweets as they come in, with no limits on number of tweets or length of time. But Trackers cannot go back in time to include old tweets. You need a TweetReach Pro subscription to run a Tracker.