Want Twitter search analytics done right? Portland’s Clicky may have nailed it

If there’s one thing we here in Portland love, it’s our Twitter. And it’s not just because the inimitable Rael Dornfest, Twitter’s user experience (UX) engineer, happens to live in Portland.

No, it’s something deeper than that. Twitter works for Portland’s dynamic. It meshes with our culture and our geekiness and our whatever.

And so it should come as absolutely no surprise that, when it comes to understanding Twitter, Silicon Forest startups come up with some interesting solutions. Like Portland-based Twitalyzer. And like the latest feature from Clicky, the lightweight yet extremely feature-heavy Web analytics tool. The new feature with which I’m so impressed? It’s called Twitter brand monitor. (Calm down, Dawn.)

Actually, on second thought, don’t calm down. Because this is ridiculously cool—especially considering it’s wedged into a system I’m already using to monitor Web traffic.

I’m going to have to agree with the folks over at Clicky when they say

If you are a Twitter user, or at least understand the value of the data that’s available from their real time search engine, this update should blow you away.

Consider me blow… oh wait. I don’t want to conjugate that that way.

Let’s just put it this way: You need Clicky Twitter monitor.

What makes Clicky Twitter monitor so great?

Well, you really just need to try the Twitter monitor feature. Or at least take a look at it (click on the image to bring up the entire report).

Not interested in clicking yet? Okay, let me see if I can outline some of the coolness.

First, you need to do a little setup. But that’s no more difficult than using Summize Twitter search.

To get the monitoring to work, you establish search terms the same way you would in Twitter search—or any other search engine for that matter. Search on anything you want.

I picked “Silicon Florist” because I always like to see what people are saying about the blog—and because I’m not very creative.

Once you’ve established your search term, Clicky uses the Twitter search API to get results on that term—and to consistently monitor that term over time, every 30 minutes.

The result?

You get some pretty interesting visualizations of how that search term is making its way around Twitter.

Using Clicky, you’ll be able to chart:

• How many tweets contain that term over a given time period?
• What kind of tweets are they? Are they positive? Are they questions? Are the links? Are they retweets?
• Who are the people who are most vocal about that topic?
• What links are being shared with that term or in relation to that term?
• Who were the primary recipients of these tweets?
• What hashtags were associated with those tweets?
• Last but not least, what exactly were those tweets?

But the beauty is that, unlike the searches and Yahoo! Pipes we’ve been managing to date, Clicky Twitter monitor plots that data over time.

I mean, imagine Stephanie Stricklen and Aaron Weiss on KGW The Square being able to show the power of Twitter to execs in a format that they could better understand. Imagine Shizzow being able to monitor who was shouting to Twitter and what Shizeeps was finding. Imagine what Raven Zachary and James Keller could learn about Small Society‘s clients iPhone apps. Or if you want a real brain bender, imagine what the Bacn boys could do with some of this monitoring power.

For many companies, this Twitter monitoring feature alone would make it worth buying a subscription to the service—and they’d still get all of the other impressive features that come with it.

Leave it to Portland to figure out new and interesting ways to interact with Twitter.

Okay. I’m not done yet.

Honestly, I still haven’t wrapped my head around how cool this is. And I know I haven’t even scratched the surface of its potential.

But I know you’ll figure out what to do with it. So do yourself a favor and test drive Clicky Twitter monitor.

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