Google query: facebook number of users
Result: One billion active users on Facebook. 100 million monthly active users on Instagram.
I also found that there are 500 million tweets per day. 6,000 tweets per second.
Most of us know that Twitter is a firehose of information and there are ways to digest so much data. In the past, I used Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.
Other than the usual suspects, there has to be more. These are a few unique social media tools for sourcing.
burrrd
This tool provides analytics from public Twitter accounts with a nice UI. Let’s try it out.
The search is by the user. I will try this one: SCSatCMU.
The account is from CMU School of CS. Some interesting results:
- The average tweet gets 11 likes and it has 204 characters
- It shows a
Most Liked Tweet. 44 retweets. - Top 20 words
- Top 20 hashtags
Some of those hashtags:
- givingCMUday
- subTchallenge
- CVPR2019
This is a great tool to get some basic Twitter analytics from specific accounts. You can get sourcing ideas about a user’s top tweet and top hashtags.
sentiment viz
See here: https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/tweet_viz/tweet_app/
This application shows a sentiment analysis of tweets. What would you need this for?
Uber had layoffs. What are people talking about on Twitter? Can I try to estimate sentiment from tweets?
The application shows a simple text box.
It shows a visualization with some guidelines. Such as the intensity of the data points. They range from unpleasant to pleasant.
The visualization shows an XY axis and four quadrants.
The X-axis is labeled unpleasant on the negative side, and pleasant on the positive side.
The Y-axis is labeled subdued on the negative, and active on the positive.
- The top-left quadrant shows these values: upset, stressed, nervous, tense
- The bottom left shows: sad, unhappy, depressed, bored
- The top right has: alert, excited, elated, happy
- The bottom right has: calm, relaxed, serene, contented
Let’s try the query: uber.
Most of the data points are concentrated between the top and bottom on the right. Which means that the tweets show something in between alert, calm, excited, and relaxed.
However, this query can be abstract. I don’t know if these are tweets talking about working at uber or just customers talking about using the service.
Let’s try this query: "laid off".
The results are similar. Most are concentrated in the middle of the right side. With a few data points on the “negative” side. I wondered why. Let’s see…
A tweet on the “positive” side of the graph says “I got laid off which gives me more time to draw. DM or email me at …”.
This is an interesting site to experiment with a few queries.
SocialBearing
This application also provides sentiment analysis for tweets and I find their pie chart easier to grasp. In addition to showing the usual Twitter analytics, it contains a lot of valuable data on the left side of results.
Search query: nodejs
- Filter tweets by: plain tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, pictures, videos
- Filter by sentiment: great, good, neutral, bad, terrible
- Filter by language
This is valuable data:
- Top contributors: It shows a list of user names
- Top influencers: Top users by reach
- Top words: Top words used in tweets
- Top hashtags, top mentions, top domains, top profile locations
onemilliontweetmap
This is a great geolocation visualization to search tweets by location. Keep in mind that geolocation has to be enabled by the user. Otherwise this metadata is not attached to the tweet.
Search query: layoffs
Then zoom in to view a specific country.
A tweet in the Bay Area says:
GameStop was one of my first real jobs as an adult.
It’s a shame to see all of these layoffs...
The tweet has some metadata:
- sentiment: 0.17
- feeling: Negative
Search query: python
A tweet near Dallas says:
...Great to hear that. I have been building Python
functions to do some scheduled job.
Metadata:
- sentiment: 0.889
- feeling: Positive
socialblade
As described on the home page, it gives you statistics for Youtube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter.
Using the search box on the top right and filtering by Twitter.
Search query: techleadhd. Filter by Twitter
This is valuable data:
- Future projections
- Detailed statistics
The main results page shows a summary of this user’s number of followers during the last 2 weeks:
- In the last 30 days, this user had 1,135 new followers
- It has graphs showing followers per month and tweets per month
Under the section Detailed Statistics it has an interesting graph that shows follower count over time:
- From 2017 up to February of 2018, this user had about 107 followers
- Then something happened, within a month increased to 1K followers
- By the end of 2018 it had 6K followers
- Then the graph increases exponentially
Search query: TechLead. Filter by: Youtube
The user summary shows this data:
- Views for the last 30 days:
3.5M - Estimated monthly earnings:
$888 - $14.2K - Last 30 days:
+51,232subscribers
Future projections:
- Within the next 2 months:
546,035subscribers - Within a year:
1,268,515subscribers
This one is a good sourcing feature Similar Channels. It includes a summary of their rank, topic, username, subscribers, and video views.
There are a lot of other social media tools out there. You could try a few demos of the paid ones and see if they match your needs. Otherwise there are a lot of free tools you can use.