What kind of service should I use to measure how hot a topic is on Twitter, and how hot it has been in the past?
I thought about:
- The Twitter API (https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/search/tweets) that lets me run searches up to 100 tweets. So in this case I have to make multiple calls to determine how many tweets there are. Is that correct?
- TweetReach, that gives reports like this: https://tweetreach.com/reports/16000571, but the cheapest plan is at 300$/month.
2
Answers
With the Twitter API, you have a few options, but none of them may be exactly what you want, and none of them can go back very far into the past. You would have to either compile that information yourself, or use an external service like the one you mentioned.
Using the search API, you can only get results from the past 7 days, and are limited to 100 tweets per request. You can also set
result_type
topopular
to get the most popular tweets about that search term. Twitter does have rate limits, but the ones for search are relatively high. You can use 180 requests every 15 minutes for any user you have authenticated, plus 450 requests every 15 minutes for the app itself (completely separate from the user requests). So if you only use app requests, you can get 45,000 tweets every 15 minutes.If you don’t need to search for specific terms, you can get trending topics in different areas using trends. The available areas can be retrieved using trends/available. Searching for trends also gives you the
tweet_volume
of each trend over the past 24 hours. If you check the trends every 24 hours and save the volumes, you can build up histories of trending topics.Another option is using the streaming api. This only gives you current tweets, but you can use track to only get results for a set of terms, which you can then analyze.
Any external service, like TweetReach, will probably either cost you money or strictly limit the amount you can do with it unless you pay.
I’m the Social Media Manager for Union Metrics (we make TweetReach and lots of other things) and I just wanted to let you know that our free snapshots are built on the Search API which gives it those restrictions you’ve already discussed above, while our full snapshot reports can grab up to 1500 tweets for $20.
We do have more comprehensive Twitter analytics which I think you’ve already looked at, and those do backfill 30 days before tracking going forward. However you might have missed our new product Echo, which allows for a full, interactive search of the entire Twitter archive (you can see it in action here https://unionmetrics.com/product/echo-twitter-archive-search/) and is available through our Social Suite.
I understand if you don’t have a large budget, and I completely understand the dilemma of cost of your time to build what you need vs. budget restrictions. Hope this helps at least let you know what else we offer!
Social Media Manager | Union Metrics
Fine Makers of TweetReach, The Union Metrics Social Suite, and more