TweetReach: How Far Did Your Tweet Travel?
TweetReach‘s tagline is “how far did your tweet travel?” and it measures reach, engagement and exposure for a particular campaign, Twitter handle, hashtag, or search term.
With TweetReach you can run a small limited search for free – but companies that want to continuously track or look at historical exposure can buy a single complete report for $20 or a pro account which starts at a monthly cost of $84. This post only looks at the free version, but I think the full version could be particularly useful for an organization who is constantly pushing out information (say around something like an event or just in general) on Twitter and wants to be able to see who talks about them the most, how many impressions are being made and confirm that they aren’t over-saturating the market with boring information.
For instance, they use the following example on their site: if you notice that your campaign has low reach and high exposure “you may have a core of users that are trying to spread your message by tweeting repeatedly but that your campaign is failing to take off beyond those users’ followers.” So while @userA and @userB may constantly re-tweet what you are saying, their followers couldn’t care less.
I ran searches on my Twitter handle, the hashtag #gousa in honor of the world cup and “open-first” to see what I could find. The search on my name was boring (not because of the tool, because of my not so interesting tweeting of late) – simply a run down of my Tweets and people that had replied to me recently. The #gousa search was massive, which isn’t surprising since the US played an awesome game tonight against Algeria. It showed the biggest contributors to this hash, how many impressions they made as well as the types of tweets.
I think this function could be useful if you had 5000 followers and you wanted to see which ones retweeted things on a certain subject so you could see if there was a pattern and figure out how to best interact with them.
Now here is where things got a little confusing. When I searched Open-First, both as open-first and “open-first” it not only provided the same results for both but it completely disregarded the dash in both cases and the quotes in the second. All the results were references to the opening of a store “brand XYZ open first UK store” not at all what I was looking for. Granted I am using the trial version and it only searches the most recent tweets, but that seems to me that this would be a problem for any company that wanted to search a term and needed to use quotes. Try it out and let us know what you think.
First, thanks for this great writeup, Marissa! You did a great job explaining how TweetReach works.
Second, I wanted to help with the “open-first” search issue. Twitter generally uses the dash/hyphen character as a minus operator (e.g., if you wanted to search for tweets that contained “open” but did not contain “first”, you’d search for “open -first”). However, that requires a space before the hyphen, so that’s not exactly what’s happening here. In cases where the hyphen connects two words without a space (“open-first”), Twitter essentially sees that hyphen as a space. So it would read a search for “open-first” (in quotes or not) as a search for “open first OR open-first” – it would return both tweets with and tweets without a hyphen. Try a search for “anti-virus software” to see what I mean. I’m not sure there is a way to return only tweets with “open-first”. But quotes around exact phrases should work just fine with all non-hyphenated terms.
I hope this helps! If you – or your readers – have any questions, please feel free to contact me anytime. And thank you again for the blog post.
Jenn Deering Davis
Chief of Community Experience
Appozite (we make TweetReach)
And, you might need my email address if you have questions.
It’s jenn [at] appozite [dot] com.
Hi Jenn,
Thanks for the feedback and clarification – glad you stopped by to check out CorpTweets!
Best,
Marissa