Within about ten minutes, unbeknownst to either of us because wonky Lotus Notes delays e-mails anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours, my colleague Todd and I sent around to the office two very similar comparison/measurement tools we found online (I was first, Todd, remember that): Twist and and the Facebook Lexicon.

It seems like with every social media conference or gathering, the topic of discussion is how to measure the impact of social media. Nobody can seem to agree how to do this (or even if we should), but I think Twist and the Lexicon give us a little bit of a starting point to work off of.

With both tools, you can search for one or more keywords to spot buzz trends in the application. Going a step further, Twist incorporates a Tweet Scan-like function that produces a real-time feed of all Tweets using that keyword.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to be effective is searching for low-volume terms. For example, if you search for “mseasons” on Twist, you can see a minuscule number, but no real graphic evidence. Apparently I’m not kind of a big deal. You need to be very broad with your terms to have any visual value. One of the examples they give on the homepage is the comparison of “hillary, obama,” which as you can imagine has been talked about a lot (note the spike during the Pennsylvania primaries).


I’ve not had a whole lot of time to play around with them and have yet to incorporate them in a practical sense, but I dig the concept. Being able to compare trends over the long term could be an incredibly valuable correlation tool between word-of-mouth and conversion – especially if they could be broadened.


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