Here’s a brief overview of the Tracker and some of its features.

Each Tracker can monitor unlimited tweets for unlimited time about any topic. You can include up to 15 distinct search terms in your Tracker to be sure you’re finding all tweets about your topic. In addition to overall summary metrics like reach, exposure, tweet volume and number of unique contributors, each Tracker provides detailed information about tweets and retweets, hashtags, URLs, contributor participation and influence, and much more.

Trackers are available with a TweetReach Pro account.

During the broadcast on Sunday, the official #GRAMMYs hashtag was tweeted 2.1 million times by more than 700K people, generating a unique reach of nearly 60 million. At its peak, use of the #GRAMMYs hashtag spiked up to 18,000 tweets per minute.

Twitter buzzed about…

Check out this stream graph of tweets about the most popular artists (click through for the interactive version). Each colored layer represents tweets about one artist. The spikes on the graph illustrate tweet volume throughout the show.

The most-talked about artists during the 2012 Grammy Awards were:

1. Adele: 340K tweets
2. Chris Brown: 152K tweets
3. Nicki Minaj: 85K tweets
4. Rihanna: 81K tweets
5. Taylor Swift: 68K tweets
6. Whitney Houston: 66K tweets
7. Bruno Mars: 60K tweets
8. Foo Fighters: 52K tweets
9. Lady Gaga: 43K tweets
10. Katy Perry: 41K tweets

Whitney Houston passed away suddenly on Saturday, which had a big impact on this year’s Grammys. The show’s touching tribute to the singer generated a lot of buzz on Twitter as fans and friends remembered Whitney and her music; there were more than 66,000 tweets about Whitney during the show.

Adele was the night’s big winner, taking home all six of the Grammys for which she was nominated. She also garned the most Twitter attention of any artist; Adele was mentioned in 340K tweets last night! Many felt that Adele’s performance was the show’s best, especially since it was her first major appearance since she had vocal cord surgery last November. In particular, many Twitterers mentioned how strong her voice sounded, and how they preferred Adele’s simple vocal performance to some of the night’s other, more choreographed numbers.

Chris Brown ignited a great deal of controversy at this year’s awards, appearing at the Grammys for the first time since he was arrested for abusing his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009. The more than 150K tweets about his two Grammy performances last night ranged from disbelief and anger at his inclusion to support from his fans.

Nicki Minaj generated an entirely different kind of controversy with her red carpet entrance and subsequent performance of her new song, “Roman Holiday.” Viewer opinions varied, with some finding it interesting, bold or weird, while others (like the Catholic Church) found it offensive.

What did you think of the 2012 Grammy Awards? What was your favorite performance?

Interested in stream graphs? Give this paper by Byron and Wattenberg a read. 

How does this affect TweetReach customers?

Hardly at all, actually.

• Most importantly, there will be no impact to TweetReach itself. TweetReach is still called TweetReach and won’t be changing in any way.
• You’ll start to see Union Metrics show up on your credit card and PayPal statements instead of Appozite.
• You’ll begin to see emails from us that come from unionmetrics.com instead of appozite.com.

And that’s pretty much it. If you’re interested to know more about the change, read on!

Why the change?

Since the beginning, we’ve wanted to build products that enable businesses of all sizes to measure their use of and impact on social media. As Union Metrics, we’ll be broadening our focus to deliver simple but sophisticated social metrics to help you measure and improve your social media campaigns. We’re very excited about this new name and everything it represents about both our growth as a business last year and what we expect for the future.

Is Union Metrics a new company?

We’re not a new or different company; we’ve just renamed ourselves. We’re still the same company we’ve always been, but with a new, better name and a prettier logo. You’ll still be dealing with the same people if you call or email us, and we still provide the same TweetReach tools you’ve come to love (we hope!). We have not sold the company or merged with anyone else.

What does the new name mean?

There’s a branch of math called set theory that’s all about dealing with groups of unique items called sets. It turns out lots of things can be treated as sets, like, for example, all the people that follow you on Twitter. One of the nifty things you can do with several sets is union them together into one big set that contains every single unique item from all the others. A little esoteric? Maybe. But it turns out it’s a great way to understand how a big audience is created from a lot of little audiences, and it’s how we measure reach. Plus, it’s easy to say, easy to spell, and looks nice on a banner.

Want to learn more about Union Metrics?

Please visit our new company website at UnionMetrics.com. You can also find Union Metrics on Facebook and on Twitter at @unionmetrics.

And please let us know if you have questions! Email us at support [at] unionmetrics [dot] com.

During last summer’s X Games, we tracked 188K tweets from 97K contributors, for an overall reach of 37.7 million. This year’s Winter X Games generated 171K tweets from 100K contributors and an overall reach of 37.9 million. Two days into these games, here were the stats:

Sadly, freeskier and X Games gold medalist Sarah Burke died a week before the games. ESPN aired a tribute for Sarah on Thursday night and the #CelebrateSarah hashtag was used in more than 3,500 tweets during the games.

Sunday, January 29, was a big day for the games, featuring the final competitions for two fan favorites – the Snowmobile Best Trick and Men’s Snowboard Superpipe. Athletes like Heath Frisby, Shaun White, and Justin Hoyer generated a lot of Twitter buzz, and Heath’s first-ever snowmobile front flip resulted in the highest tweet spike of the entire games (1,634 tweets per minute).

By the end of the Winter X Games, the most retweeted tweet was from @espn and referred to snowboarder Shaun White’s perfect score in the Snowboard Superpipe Final. It got 1,428 retweets and generated 3.3 million impressions.

It was a great four days! We’re already looking forward to next year.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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

Happy holidays!

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!