There’s a new tool that online marketers, brand managers and social media experts should be aware of: Research.ly, a new social search platform for researching Twitter conversations and tracking the associated analytics. But this is not your average Twitter analytics tool.
Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr’s proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter’s full feed, a data stream often referred to as the “Twitter firehose.” Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more.
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Research.ly’s technology breakthrough are these custom indexes on top of Twitter’s firehose. As noted above, they include gender, sentiment, location and degrees of separation, but also Re-Tweets, phrases and trending topics. Although the project has been in the works for just a couple of years, Research.ly says that it took 20 man-years for these indexes to be built. Now, these indexes are continually updated in real-time.
What that means for the service’s end users is that you have the ability to parse Twitter analytics in a number of different ways. When you do a keyword search, Research.ly can identify the people talking about that word or phrase, and then you can drill down into the “Interest Graph” to splice the data even further by gender, sentiment, etc. or find related word clouds, hashtags, links, @names and more. It can even pull up related media, like photos from Twitpic or YouTube videos.
In addition, Research.ly has grouped Twitter users into various demographics (think “moms,” “CEOs,” “engineers,” etc.), which means users can now direct the service to return very precise answers to your queries. For example, you could discover things like Mommy bloggers in San Francisco tweeting about human rights or all the good things said about Coke and bad things said about Pepsi.
Account owners, who are presumably accessing the service using a business or brand’s Twitter account, can even drill down to see the degrees of separation between themselves and a particular user and how they are connected.
Research.ly’s pricing will be $99 per seat per month or $499 per seat per month for its premium features. We’ve been given an account to try but have had access to it for just a day, so we can’t make a final recommendation or endorsement as to its capabilities, but we’re definitely excited about the potential.
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