Gathering useful information about your audience from a lot of tweets, in little time.

‘Listening’ to tweets

Social media has become a valuable source for gaining knowledge about different audiences. Since users share what’s going on in their minds and expressing this by posting content in different forms, social media is able to tell you more about the profiles of the audience. From a commercial perspective, social media is a rich source of information about the demands and desires of potential customers. Finding a way to ‘listen’ to the audience is a way to align what you offer to the desires of your audience. However, content of the audience comes in high unstructured amounts even with the search possibilities of the social media sites. Processing content of users in manageable parts is a solution to gain knowledge about what the audience is saying about a certain topic. Being able to quickly explore what exactly is told about a certain topic is supplemental for a successful social media strategy. For these two solutions the free and easy to use web application TweetExplorer comes in. You can use TweetExplorer as a social listener for Twitter from your browser. This blog shortly explains two parts of TweetExplorer that can help you easily listening to your audience on Twitter.

Frequent terms in tweets – the “what” question

After inserting a topic, choosing a language and choosing the amount of tweets you want to load, a wordcloud appears. The wordcloud presents terms in the collection of tweets in order of frequency: frequent terms are presented large and less frequent terms are presented small in the wordcloud. This wordcloud already provides a quick overview about how Twitter users are talking about the chosen topic.
By using the slider you can manage the minimum term frequency which helps you focus on the more frequent terms. Next to the wordcloud you can select to present the terms in the tweets in a table that presents the words with their frequencies or just in words separately presented in a column. All these visualisations of the terms of the tweets are managed by the slider with which you decide the minimum frequency a term should have.

This way of exploring the frequencies of terms appearing in the tweets gives you a quicker overview than reading every tweet separately. Just within a minute you gain insight about what your audience is saying on Twitter about the inserted topic. The frequent terms are telling which other topics or words are also important next to the inserted topic. However, this might not be enough. To gain a more thorough understanding about what people are saying in the collection of tweets, you can explore which terms are associated with the frequent terms. That is where you can use the “term relations” section for.

Term associations

Exploring the associations with frequent terms in tweets is a fast way to find the central message the collection of tweets is telling you. By inserting terms (wether or not frequent) in the term associations section, words with their associations are presented in a table. The level of association ranges from 0 to 1. Exploring associations is a way to group terms in a large collection of tweets. This way you do not have to manually read every tweet to see what is told about a frequent term. Working with frequent terms and term associations also helps you to be more accurate in searching for the original tweet (which can be done in the “search tweets” section of TweetExplorer or in the search section on Twitter).

Please do not confuse term associations with sentiment analysis. Both exploring sentiment analysis and term associations are helpful methods of listening to your audience on Twitter, but those are two different things. Sentiment analysis groups tweets to a determined selection of sentiments. These sentiments are defined by terms , which groups tweets containing those terms to that sentiment. Term associations have little to do with sentiments because those sentiments are not defined. Exploring term associations is just exploring which terms appear in the same tweets and how close those terms appear next to each other on those tweets.

Summary

In this article I told you how you can make your social listening strategy on Twitter more efficient by listening to your audience on Twitter with TweetExplorer. Using a different way to approach a collection of tweets enables you to achieve more in the same time. The easy and accessible character of TweetExplorer should be the alternative methods of gaining insights from tweets with a more manual character. This web application enables the user to use the power of Text Mining on social media (in this case Twitter). Whether the user is a student, a webshop owner or something else, TweetExplorer can always be used for a quick social listening session on Twitter.