Twitter tools (that actually work) for understanding your competitors.

If you want to bring your “A” game to social media marketing (ie, if you have a product or service to move and need to show results), market research is critical. Having actual data can be quite a revelation, and applying it will lend direction to your social efforts if you’ve been flying sans strategie.

You might benefit from knowing:

• What your competitors are talking about
• Who’s interacting with them
• Do you share any enthusiastic fans?
• Where is your network from, who are they, and what gets a rise out them
• What do they like, what do they share, & with whom?
  

Which tools can actually provide this kind of information, though? Which ones survived the boom of novelty Twitter development & aren’t languishing in a buggy perpetual beta twilight? Which ones deliver something more than a nebulous, inactionable percentage of supposed influence?

Here are the Twitter metrics tools I’m actually using that let you mine usernames for public data that, in aggregate, painstakingly copied into columns of a Google Doc (go on, click “graph”! It’s rewarding!), and scrutinized late into the night will yield a few nuggets of demographic gold.

Trendsmap

Usefulness of data: Informative. Enlightening, almost.

Tells you what’s trending (being talked about the most) in your city. Good for identifying influencers (by username) and hot topics (by keyword or hashtag). If you chart this over time, patterns (genres) will emerge. This is 14 karat information if your market is 100% local.

The Archivist

Usefulness of data: Crucial if you need to export to Excel. Boolean search, OH YES.

I like the Archivist. It looks great and the development team reply PDQ to email & seem super cool. More importantly, you can do a boolean search (like “@username + special keywords”) and on the desktop app you can export the whole shebang to a spreadsheet (which sometimes, lets face it, you really need to do).

Update: As I wrote, the ability to export was being removed by the Archivists in order to comply with Twitter’s ToS . My copy of the desktop app continues to provide this functionality, but shhh. Note to @Twitter: Think of a way to make exporting ok. People need it to build their own spreadsheets for thorough metrics, and to track stuff like tweeted contest entries. Help us to help you.

TweetEffect

Usefulness of data: Major league.

Tells you exactly what tweets got you (or anyone else) followed or unfollowed, so it’s pretty darn helpful for tweaking your wording/subject matter on a minute level. May cause uncomfortable cringing as you reread your most boorish, follower-shedding tweets. Can lead to paralyzing narcissism.

Tweepz

Usefulness of data: Useful.

A location search (“loc:yourcity”) will give you a ballpark of the size of your market. You can sort by follower size, if schmoozing the influential is your bag.

Twitalyzer

Usefulness of data: Kinda.

Good for identifying influencers and dominant subject matter (hashtags, topics).  Track what’s being talked about most by specific people (influencers or comepetitors). If a user is in conversation with a few of your competitors, you’ve got yourself an industry mover & shaker with whom you might want to get friendly.

You’d be amazed how detailed (& quick!) it is to gauge brand sentiment with social media

This is the kind of real-time, granular brand monitoring you can achieve with social media (Doritos is pictured here). Brand Bowl 2010 demonstrated the percentage of positive and negative reactions on Twitter to Super Bowl ads and extracted people’s reactions down to the most frequently-used words, as the reactions were happening.

Twitter may not be where your audience is talking about you—I’m still blown away by the recent stat that only 1.45% of Canadians tweet, as opposed to almost 20% of Americans—but this shows the level of sophistication available to brands interested in monitoring their influence & measuring their social media ROI. As a marketing nerd, I’m inspired by this.