Geek Soap Box

If you are a marketer, public relations professional, social media maven, or even just someone really into talking about stuff, chances are you have used the native search function on Twitter and found it to be a little…lacking.

Twitter is great at many things — facilitating real-time conversations on the latest news and trends, meeting and interacting with new and interesting people from around the world, and more — but when it comes to searching the service’s already billions-deep archives the site is anemic at best.  To a certain extent, this is completely understandable; given the sheer volume of tweets that are out there, indexing and making them all available at any given moment would probably take a server cluster the size of the Grand Canyon.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t still incredibly frustrating.  I have been noodling for nearly two years now on my graduate research paper extolling the virtues of robust Twitter engagement for marketers, and having access to the raw data would have proven invaluable.  Of course, I tried to even explain this to the Powers That Be that run Twitter, but their customer support and press offices are perhaps even worse than their pathetic search.  To wit, after having an open service ticket for over one year, the request was discretely closed with no notification and no resolution:

It’s been awhile since you’ve submitted or updated your original request. Twitter Support is closing older tickets in order to get an accurate idea of current problems. Due to a ticket backlog, Twitter Support may’ve been unable to respond to your request in a timely manner. Our apologies! Many things have changed since you last wrote in; if you were having trouble with something, please try again as your issue may’ve been fixed.

Thanks for nothing guys! At least I received a response, though…my repeated e-mails to the press office (even in my “official” capacity) returned a high and mighty zero communications.

Anyway, let’s take a quick look at some of the (only) alternatives available out there to those desperate to hear the voice of the masses.  We will start with the aforementioned native Twitter search, and run a query for “escalade hybrid,” which is the example I have been using for my research (it definitely invokes passionate responses both positive and negative, as you might imagine).

A search as of 10:47am this morning yields three pages of results, with Tweets only dating back as far as ten days ago.  Anecdotally, this is actually a very solid result, for Twitter, since over the weekend I could only get a day or two of tweets at maximum.  Regardless, for those looking for a deeper history of commentary on any topic, it is a relatively useless tool indeed.

Perhaps this is why other search services have sprung up to fill the void.  Unfortunately, many of these are equally burdened by Twitter’s close-vested approach to making its data available and transparent.  Searchtastic.com is a popular newcomer to the world of Twitter Search, but a check on the same query at 10:55am yields even less results than the native search, and with a far longer elapsed time to generate the results (nearly twenty seconds, as opposed to a fraction of a second).  The plus for Searchtastic, though, is an absolutely awesome “Export to Excel” function that renders your results in a searchable, sortable table of goodness.  Ironically, the format chosen is nearly identical to the one I’ve been using for years now to manually track my data!

You want metrics? You got it!

Finally, we have TweetScan, a site that promotes itself as a “Twitter Backup.” A real-time look at 10:57am returns a whopping two tweets.  But wait!  TweetScan offers a “click for more” link at the bottom of the page, and lo and behold following those instructions returns a deluge of raw data: literally hundreds of tweets, dating as far back as 2008, including ones long since deleted or from users no longer on the social network.  For this humble researcher, TweetScan has been an absolute godsend, and has allowed me to fill in the data gaps that creeped up when I didn’t go back and update my data at least once a week.  It should serve as a must-bookmark for anyone interested in social media commentary and historical brand metrics.

Ultimately, there is no perfect answer for finding the metrics that marketers long to possess that can easily and capably gauge the success of social media campaigns.  Slowly but surely, though, as demand increases and technical ingenuity grows, the Holy Grail of Metrics might be chosen humbly and wisely.