Twitter is one of the most used real-time discussion platform out there, sometimes it’s hard to stay on top of things and know what exactly people are talking about most, in a region or another. A visual map of the most discussed things on twitter can help discovering new topics in your region but also discover discussions from regions you are not very familiar with.
I have this twitter tool for quite a while in my bookmarks. Since I’ve added it, it got a lot of new features and ways to break down the river of information that is posted on twitter. Let’s look at it a bit more detailed.
Zooming in to a more specific region and clicking on the tag you are most interested in you can see how much interest that tag generated over the last 7 days and a live stream of those tweets.
From this point you have two options, looking at where else in the world people discuss about the hashtag #nyc and what else people are talking about in New York.
Checking by where the keyword/hashtag is used most
I’ve started the example with the #nyc hashtag, but it can be the name of your brand or anything else.
Looking over at the hastag #nyc, we can see that it’s most used in New York (that’s obvious), in Florida, in California and the most interesting is that it is used in Japan, Saitama. This doesn’t mean it’s not used also in other regions of the world, it means that it is most used in those regions. If you zoom-in to another country you will be able to see if they discuss about the NYC hashtag or not.
Checking what people in that region/city are talking about
The second option after selecting your keyword from the map would be to see what else people are talking about. The heat map view shows the most active parts of New York on Twitter.
If you look over on the sidebar you will see the trending videos, trending images, popular people in new york and the top keywords used. And if you are a resident or fan of new york, you can even follow a twitter account with top trends from the city.
What to use for?
The tool can be used for lots of stuff:
- To stay up to date with what is happening in your region or a region of interest (politics, sports, events, and brands)
- To watch where people talk most about your brand
- To discover things you didn’t know about
- To see where your social campaign had more impact
- To better optimize the content which is regionally intended
- To react fast to discussions about your brand
- To see in real-time when airing a show on tv where people discuss more about it
- and the list can continue
Now, go ahead and test it TrendsMap.com . What do you think about this tool, helpful or not?
Be sure to check also:
- “Twitter Cards, simple steps to get them for your website” where I obviously tell you how to get your awesome twitter cards.
- “Facebook Global Brand Pages, you want them but can you afford them?” where I talk about the requirements to get the Global Brand Pages structure on Facebook.
- “Facebook got greedy and it’s not stopping” where I talk about Facebook’s strategy to charge companies twice for the same service.
- “Why Social Media Optimization is important to SEO nowadays” where I explain how SMO influences Search Engine Results.
And: Connect with me on LinkedIn, Follow me on Twitter, Add me to your circles or go up for all the details.
[…] Visual map of top twitter discussions in your region by Rudi Gabriel Bedy […]
Interesting article and tool. Not sure exactly how I would use it for marketing though?
Adam, depends very much on how evolved the marketing efforts are in the company you want to use it with but it also depends of that company’s nature.
Think about it this way: You have an offline to online campaign running in several spots across the US (same language, can’t use europe 🙂 ) . With this tool you can see how viral it went and where the campaign worked better. That data can be used in the future to have such a campaign in that region and try something else for the regions where it had no impact.
Some examples can be seen also here (scroll down): http://trendsmap.com/products
Now, from what I see on trendsmap, you don’t have so much data on keywords which are not very popular, but in the case a company want’s it’s brand name to be followed by the tool, I think there is a way of doing it.
You just have to get creative and find a way of using it in a productive way 🙂