Social Media Keyword Research: Twist

Posted by Martin Jamieson | April 24, 2008 .

I’m spending a lot of time on Twitter lately, I don’t think there is any better way to keep up with breaking topics and to see what types of things everyone else is currently talking about. If you want to be part of active conversations on the web, and make sure you blog posts are relevant *now*, then Twitter is a great place for you to be.

Following people who are leading these conversations is one thing, but lately several Twitter tools have popped up to make keyword analysis not only possible, but easy across the entire Twitter Network. A new one that has just come to my attention today, Twist, makes the job even easier and is easily one of the best I’ve seen for discovering what people are talking about right now.

What is Twist?

If you’ve played around with Google Trends, then you basically know what Twist does. It’s trend analysis for Twitter, enter your search terms (separated by commas) and it’ll pop back with a nice graph on the number of mentions of those keywords over the last 7 days - here’s an example I just ran for ‘marketing’ and ’seo’ (click for a bigger pic).

A couple of things to note, it only displays data for the past 7 days - but that’s still a good snapshot of data, especially if you are combining your analysis with looking for hot topics to blog about, and you’ll also need to use other twitter search tools to track down the people talking about those keywords if you want to join their conversations, but overall Twist is definitely one tool I’ll be using a lot.

Follow me on Twitter here: @martyj