Earlier this month Topsy announced that it has now indexed every Twitter message since the first tweet was posted in 2006, about 425 billion pieces of content. What's more the database is free to search at Topsy.com.
Topsy was designed to help make sense of the billions of tweets being posted on Twitter. The free Topsy social search tool is very powerful in allowing marketers to track their brand on Twitter, to see how content is being shared, who is sharing, the key influencers and the sentiment over time. There are more sophisticated tools available with the pro edition from $12,000 a year but the free search is very powerful, much more so than the standard and advanced Twitter searches.
You can use a wide range of search operators and also search for tweets from a person, referencing a person, containing links to a site or even search for conversations between two people. You can also use Topsy's free social analytics tools to track keyword popularity or mentions of a domain over time. Topsy allows you to conduct six powerful searches:
- Review all the shares of a piece of content including shares by key influencers
- Find influencers on a specific topic
- Find all content from a person or influencer on a specific topic
- Find all tweets from a user linking to a specific site and the links they are sharing
- Find sentiment scores for a brand and track over time
- Undertake detailed analytics tracking for keywords or sites
I have explained how you can do each of these below.
1. Review all the shares of a piece of content including shares by key influencers
You can type in the url for any article or piece of content on the web, whether yours or a competitors. You can do this with the standard Twitter search but you will only get the most recent results. With Topsy you will get most of the tweets linking to this content. For example when I searched for the url of one of my Social Media Today articles on Twitter I got just 3 recent results, by contrast the Topsy search returned 676 tweets. Topsy also identified 55 tweets from influencers and allows me to click the influencers tab at the top to see them. Not surprisingly Social Media Today was one of the top influencers.
2. Find influencers on a specific topic
With Topsy you can search a specific topic to find influencers. In the example below I searched for the key influencers on elearning. This search identified Christopher Pappas as a key influencer on elearning.
3. Find all content from a person or influencer on a specific topic
You can find all the tweets from a specific user on a specific topic. Just search for from@username and then the topic. In my example below I decided to see how many times Christopher Pappas mentioned my company Kineo, which was just twice.
4. Find all tweets from a user linking to a specific site
This is a really nice feature as you can see all the links to a specific site that a person shared. Just search for "from@username site:website". You can see in the example below that I tweeted links to Social Media Today 11 times and which articles I linked to. You can also see that the sentiment was positive.
5. Find sentiment scores and track over time
You can type in a brand name or phrase and see Topsy's assessment of the sentiment score over a period of time. You can choose the time frame from the left hand menu. In the example below I searched for Kineo and found 443 tweets in the past 30 days with a sentiment score of 56.
6. Analytics tracking There are a number of analytics tracking options using Topsy's free analytics tool, for example: You can track keyword popularity over time. In this example I searched for Google Plus to see if there were any marked trends.
You can also track two or more domains to see who is receiving more tweets. In this example I searched for tweets linking to Social Media Today's site and tweets linking to Moz's site.
You can also track which domain is seeing more tweets on a specific topic. You just add the topic to the search for each domain. In summary, Topsy is a great free tracking tool for Twitter and a powerful tool for your social searches.